break them according to the principles.[1110]--On the other hand, as a
matter of fact, it hands over all government powers to the elections and
confers on the clubs the control of the authorities: which is to offer
a premium to the presumption of the ambitious who put themselves forward
because they think themselves capable, and who defame their rulers
purposely to displace them.--Every government department, organization
or administrative system is like a hothouse which serves to favor some
species of the human plant and wither others. This one is the best one
for the propagation and rapid increase of the coffee-house politician,
club haranguer, the stump-speaker, the street-rioter, the committee
dictator--in short, the revolutionary and the tyrant. In this political
hothouse wild dreams and conceit will assume monstrous proportions, and,
in a few months, brains that are now only ardent become hotheads.
Let us trace the effect of this excessive, unhealthy temperature on
imaginations and ambitions. The old tenement is down; the foundations of
the new one are not yet laid; society has to be made over again from top
to bottom. All willing men are asked to come and help, and, as one
plain principle suffices in drawing a plan, the first comer may succeed.
Henceforth political fancies swarm in the district meetings, in
the clubs, in the newspapers, in pamphlets, and in every head-long,
venturesome brain.
"There is not a merchant's clerk educated by reading the 'Nouvelle
Héloise,'[1111] not a school teacher that has translated ten pages of
Livy, not an artist that has leafed through Rollin, not an aesthete
converted into journalists by committing to memory the riddles of the
'Contrat Social,' who does not draft a constitution... As nothing is
easier than to perfect a daydream, all perturbed minds gather, and
become excited, in this ideal realm. They start out with curiosity and
end up with enthusiasm. The man in the street rushes to the enterprise
in the same manner as a miser to a conjurer promising treasures, and,
thus childishly attracted, each hopes to find at once, what has never
been seen under even the most liberal governments: perpetual perfection,
universal brotherhood, the power of acquiring what one lacks, and a life
composed wholly of enjoyment."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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