reliable and competent instruments; for they have but very few partisans other than those of doubtful probity and of notorious incapacity.--Cromwell had around him, to carry out the puritan program, the moral élite of the nation, an army of rigorists, with narrow consciences, but much more strict towards themselves than towards others, men who never drank and who never swore, who never indulged for a moment in sensuality or idleness, who forbade themselves every act of omission or commission about which they held any scruples, the most honest, the most temperate, the most laborious and the most persevering of mankind,[2222] the only ones capable of laying the foundations of that practical morality on which England and the United States still subsist at the present day.--Around Peter the Great, in carrying out his European program, stood the intellectual élite of the country, an imported staff of men of ability associated with natives of moderate ability, every well-taught resident foreigner and indigenous Russian, the only ones able to organize schools and public institutions, to set up a vast central and regular system of administration, to assign rank according to service and merit, in short, to erect on the snow and mud of a shapeless barbarism a conservatory of civilization which, transplanted like an exotic tree, grows and gradually becomes acclimated.--Around Couthon, Saint-Just, Billaud, Collot, and Robespierre, with the exception of certain men devoted, not to Utopianism but the country, and who, like Carnot, conform to the system in order to save France, there are but a few sectarians to carry out the Jacobin program. These are men so short-sighted as not to clearly comprehend its fallacies, or sufficiently fanatical to accept its horrors, a lot of social outcasts and self-constituted statesmen, infatuated through incommensurate faculties with the parts they play, unsound in mind and superficially educated, wholly incompetent, boundless in ambition, their consciences perverted, callous or deadened by sophistry, hardened through arrogance or killed by crime, by impunity and by success.