caprice, but upon laws, still these laws are nothing but another sort of teeth with which the aristocratic brood seizes its prey, and another sort of daggers wherewith it assassinates people. For in reality, no tyrant upon the Continent squeezes, by his own arbitrary will, so many taxes out of his subjects as the English people are obliged to pay by law; and no tyrant was ever so cruel as England's Criminal Law, which daily commits murder for the amount of one shilling, and that with the coldest formality. Although many improvements have recently been made in this melancholy state of affairs in England; although limits have been placed to temporal and clerical avarice, and though the great falsehood of a popular representation is, to a certain degree, occasionally modified by transferring the perverted electoral voice of a rotten borough to a great manufacturing town; and although the harshest intolerance is here and there softened by giving certain rights to other sects, still it is all a miserable patching up which cannot last long, and the stupidest tailor in England can foresee that, sooner or later, the old garment of state will be rent asunder into wretched rags. "No man seweth a piece of new cloth on an old garment; else the new piece that filled it up taketh away from the old, and the rent is made worse. And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred; but new wine must be put into new bottles." The deepest truth blooms only out of the deepest love, and hence comes the harmony of the views of the elder Preacher in the Mount, who spoke against the aristocracy of Jerusalem; and those later preachers of the mountain, who, from the summit of the Convention in Paris, preached a tri-coloured gospel, according to which, not merely the form of the State, but all social life should be, not patched, but formed anew, newly founded; yes, born again. I speak of the French Revolution, that epoch of the world in which the doctrines of freedom and of equality rose so triumphantly from those universal sources of knowledge which we call reason, and which must, as an unceasing revelation which repeats itself in every human head, and founds a distinct branch of knowledge, be far preferable to that transmitted revelation which makes itself known only in a few elect, and which, by the multitude, can only be _believed_. The privileged aristocracy, the caste-system with their peculiar rights, were never able to combat this last-mentioned sort of revelation (which is itself of an aristocratic nature) so safely and surely as reason, which is democratic by nature, now does. The history of the Revolution is the military history of this strife, in which we have all taken a greater or lesser part; it is the death-struggle with Egyptianism.