the
greatest of crimes: he has lied before the law."

Truly, as I said above, we are in a convent

V. Social Contract, Summary.

Complete triumph and last excesses of classic reason.--How
it becomes monomania.--Why its work is not enduring.

These articles are all inevitable consequences of the social contract.
The moment I enter the corporation I abandon my own personality; I
abandon, by this act, my possessions, my children, my church, and my
opinions. I cease to be proprietor, father, Christian and philosopher.
The state is my substitute in all these functions. In place of my will,
there is henceforth the public will, that is to say, in theory, the
mutable absolutism of a majority counted by heads, while in fact, it is
the rigid absolutism of the assembly, the faction, the individual who
is custodian of the public authority.--On this principle an outburst of
boundless conceit takes place. The very first year Gregoire states in
the tribune of the Constituent Assembly, "we might change religion if we
pleased, but we have no such desire." A little later the desire comes,
and it is to be carried out; that of Holbach is proposed, then that of
Rousseau, and they dare go much farther. In the name of Reason, of which
the State alone is the representative and interpreter, they undertake
to unmake and make over, in conformity with Reason and with Reason only,
all customs, festivals, ceremonies, and costumes, the era, the calendar,
weights and measures, the names of the seasons, months, weeks and days,
of places and monuments, family and baptismal names, complimentary
titles, the tone of discourse, the mode of salutation, of greeting,
of speaking and of writing, in such a fashion, that the Frenchman, as
formerly with the puritan or the Quaker, remodeled even in his inward
substance, exposes, through the smallest details of his conduct and
exterior, the dominance of the all-powerful principle which refashions
his being and the inflexible logic which controls his thoughts. This
constitutes the final result and complete triumph of the classic spirit.
Installed in narrow brains, incapable of entertaining two related ideas,
it is to become a cold or furious monomania, fiercely and unrelentingly
destroying a past it curses, and attempting to establish a millennium,
and all in the name of an illusory contract, at once anarchical and
despotic, which unfetters insurrection and justifies dictatorship; all
to end in a