the
brilliant eloquence of a man who has rendered signal services to
philosophy, and whose entire works must not be judged of by the single
particular which I am about to mention. In the year 1829, M. Cousin was
developing at the Sorbonne the meaning of these verses of La Fontaine,
which introduce the fable of the Wolf and the Lamb:

La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure:
Je vais le montrer tout a l'heure.

He had written as the programme of one of his lectures: _Morality of
Victory_. Now see how he justified this surprising title: "I have
absolved victory as necessary and useful; I now undertake to absolve it
as just in the strictest sense of the word. Men do not usually see in
success anything else than the triumph of strength, and an honorable
sympathy draws us to the side of the vanquished; I hope I have shown
that since there must always be a vanquished side, and since the
vanquished side is always that which ought to be so, to accuse the
conqueror is to take part against humanity, and to complain of the
progress of civilization. We must go farther; we must prove that the
vanquished deserved to be so, that the conqueror not only serves the
interests of civilization, but that he is better, more moral than the
vanquished, and that it is on that account he is the conqueror.... It is
time that the philosophy of history should place at its feet the
declamations of philanthropy."[148]

These words are worth considering. When Brennus the Gaul was having the
gold weighed which he exacted from the vanquished Romans, he threw his
heavy sword into the balance, exclaiming, _Vae Victis!_ Woe to the
conquered! He simply meant to say that he was the stronger, and did not
foresee that a Gaul of the nineteenth century, availing himself of the
labors of learned Germany, would demonstrate that being the stronger he
was on that very account the more just. But we must not wander too far
from our subject.

When the spectacle of the world is freely indulged in without any
application to it of the measure of the conscience, what first strikes
the view is success. It is necessary therefore to begin with rendering
glory to success by declaring victory good. Now, mark well here the
conflict of the old notions with the so-called modern mind. From the old
point of view, victory in the issue belongs to good, because while man
is tossed in strife and tumult, God is leading him on; but the success
of good is real