Comparison between despotisms.--Philip II and Louis XIV.-- Cromwell and Frederick the Great.--Peter the Great and the Sultans.--Relationship between the tasks the Jacobins are to carry out and the assets at their disposal.--Disproportion between the burdens they are to carry and the forces at their disposal.--Folly of their undertaking.--Physical force the only governmental force they possess.--They are compelled to exercise it.--They are compelled to abuse it.-- Character of their government.--Character requisite of their leaders. Several times, in European history, despotism almost equally harsh have born down heavily on human effort; but never have any of them been so thoroughly inept; for none have ever attempted to raise so heavy a mass with so short a lever. And to start with, no matter how authoritative the despot might have been, his intervention was limited.--Philip II. burned heretics, persecuted Moors and drove out Jews; Louis XIV. forcibly converted the Protestants; but both used violence only against dissenters, about a fifteenth or a twentieth of their subjects. If Cromwell, on becoming Protector, remained sectarian, and the compulsory servant of an army of sectarians, he took good care not to impose on other churches the theology, rites and discipline of his own church;[2218] on the contrary, he repressed fanatical outrages; protected the Anabaptists as well as his Independents. He granted paid curates to the Presbyterians as well as the public exercise of their worship, he showed the Episcopalians a large tolerance and gave them the right to worship in private; he maintained the two great Anglican universities and allowed the Jews to erect a synagogue.--Frederick II. drafted into his army every able-bodied peasant that he could feed; he kept every man twenty years in the service, under a discipline worse than slavery, with almost certain prospect of death; and in his last war, he sacrificed about one sixth of his male subjects;[2219] but they were serfs, and his conscription did not touch the bourgeois class. He put his hands in the pockets of the bourgeois and of every other man, and took every crown they had; when driven to it, he adulterated coin and stopped paying his functionaries; but, under the scrutiny of his eyes, always open, the administration was honest, the police effective, justice exact, toleration unlimited, and the freedom of the press complete; the king allowed the publication of the most cutting pamphlets against himself, and their public sale, even at Berlin.--A little earlier, in the great empire of the east, Peter the Great,[2220] with whip in hand, lashed his Muscovite bears and made them drill and dance in European fashion; but were bears accustomed from father to son to the whip and chain; moreover, he stood as the orthodox head of their faith, and left their mir (the village commune) untouched.--Finally, at the