dged by moral
standards, be so flagrantly unjust as to demand the resistance of all
good men. There is no need to labour the point: actual examples crowd
upon the mind. Who would condemn the revolt of the Greeks against
Turkish rule? Who would contend that the degenerate society of the later
Bourbon monarchy did not deserve dissolution? Who would maintain that
John Hampden and Oliver Cromwell had no moral warrant for their
resistance to Charles I, or their successors to James II. We may freely
allow that in these cases, and in many similar ones, there existed on
ethical grounds a right, or more strictly a communal duty, to rebel. Few
would now proclaim with Filmer the divine right of any government to
exact obedience quite irrespective of the wishes or the interests of its
subjects. Still fewer would agree with Hobbes that an original contract
precludes for ever all opposition to sovereign political authority. The
ground on which political obligation is asserted has been shifted. The
State is recognized as "an institution for the promotion of the common
good," and it is admitted that if it ceases to promote the common good
the obligation to obey it is transformed into an obligation to reform
it, or even to

Shatter it to bits--and then
Remould it nearer to the heart's desire.

But, viewed thus, the right of rebellion assumes an aspect of awful
responsibility, perhaps the most tremendous within the sphere of
politics that the mind can conceive. For rebellion means the breaking-up
of the existing order, the throwing of institutions into the
melting-pot, the letting loose of incalculable forces of discord and
destruction, the suspension of law, the return to chaos, in the hope
that out of the welter a new and better cosmos--one more fitted to
promote the common good--may be evolved. Every rebel, or prospective
rebel, whether of the passive or the active type, ought to ponder well
the logical consequences of his revolt against authority, ought to
consider the inevitable results that would flow from the general
adoption of the principles which he professes, ought to decide whether
or not he really desires to overthrow the polity under which he lives,
ought to ask if he and his fellows are able to face with any serious
hope of success the colossal task of constructing a new society on the
ruins of the old. Now the historic rebels to whom I have referred above
by way of example--the Greek Nationalists, the Fren