Generally speaking, they fared infinitely better than the Protestants had done under similar circumstances, for France was too hopelessly disorganized to take more than very perfunctory measures against the enemies of her constitution. And as none of them seemed to run the risk of the galleys, the excellent clerics were soon emboldened to ask that they, the non-jurors, the “refractory ones” as they were popularly called, be officially recognized as one of the “tolerated sects” and be accorded those privileges which during the previous three centuries they had so persistently refused to grant to their compatriots of the Calvinist faith. The situation, for those of us who look back at it from the safe distance of the year 1925, was not without a certain grim humor. But no definite decision was taken, for the Assembly soon afterwards fell entirely under the denomination of the extreme radicals and the treachery of the court, combined with the stupidity of His Majesty’s foreign allies, caused a panic which in less than a week spread from the coast of Belgium to the shores of the Mediterranean and which was responsible for that series of wholesale assassinations which raged from the second to the seventh of September of the year 1792. From that moment on the Revolution was bound to degenerate into a reign of terror. The gradual and evolutionary efforts of the philosophers came to naught when a starving populace began to suspect that their own leaders were engaged in a gigantic plot to sell the country to the enemy. The explosion which then followed is common history. That the conduct of affairs in a crisis of such magnitude is likely to fall into the hands of unscrupulous and ruthless leaders is a fact with which every honest student of history is sufficiently familiar. But that the principal actor in the drama should have been a prig, a model-citizen, a hundred-percenting paragon of Virtue, that indeed was something which no one had been able to foresee. When France began to understand the true nature of her new master, it was too late, as those who tried in vain to utter their belated words of warning from the top of a scaffold in the Place de la Concorde could have testified. Thus far we have studied all revolutions from the point of view of politics and economics and social organization. But not until the historian shall turn psychologist or the psychologist shall turn historian shall we really be able to explain and understand those dark forces that shape the destinies of nations in their hour of agony and travail. There are those who hold that the world is ruled by sweetness and light. There are those who maintain that the human race respects only one thing, brute force. Some hundred years from now, I may be able to make a choice. This much, however, seems certain to us, that the greatest of all experiments in our sociological laboratory, the French revolution, was a noisy apotheosis of violence.