mmate education, could have perhaps
done little more than attempt to mitigate the general misery, and to
remove some of its causes. For it is one of the most pernicious dogmas of
the despotic system, and the one which the candid student of history
soonest discovers to be false, that the masses of mankind are to look to
any individual, however exalted by birth or intellect, for their
redemption. Woe to the world if the nations are never to learn that their
fate is and ought to be in their own hands; that their institutions,
whether liberal or despotic, are the result of the national biography and
of the national character, not the work of a few individuals whose names
have been preserved by capricious Accident as heroes and legislators. Yet
there is no doubt that, while comparatively powerless for good, the
individual despot is capable of almost infinite mischief. There have been
few men known to history who have been able to accomplish by their own
exertions so vast an amount of evil as the king who had just died. If
Philip possessed a single virtue it has eluded the conscientious research
of the writer of these pages. If there are vices--as possibly there are
from which he was exempt, it is because it is not permitted to human
nature to attain perfection even in evil. The only plausible
explanation--for palliation there is none--of his infamous career is that
the man really believed himself not a king but a god. He was placed so
high above his fellow-creatures as, in good faith perhaps, to believe
himself incapable of doing wrong; so that, whether indulging his passions
or enforcing throughout the world his religious and political dogmas, he
was ever conscious of embodying divine inspirations and elemental laws.
When providing for the assassination of a monarch, or commanding the
massacre of a townfull of Protestants; when trampling on every oath by
which a human being can bind himself; when laying desolate with fire and
sword, during more than a generation, the provinces which he had
inherited as his private property, or in carefully maintaining the flames
of civil war in foreign kingdoms which he hoped to acquire; while
maintaining over all Christendom a gigantic system of bribery,
corruption, and espionage, keeping the noblest names of England and
Scotland on his pension-lists of traitors, and impoverishing his
exchequer with the wages of iniquity paid in France to men of all
degrees, from princes of blood like Guise