ssible question of
casuistry between honour and temptation. Nor could that sort of question
have, throughout the sternest trials or the humblest callings to which
his after-life had been subjected, forced admission into his brain.
He was one of those men, perhaps the most terrible though unconscious
criminals, who are the offsprings produced by intellectual power and
egotistical ambition. If you had offered to Victor de Mauleon the crown
of the Caesars, on condition of his doing one of those base things
which "a gentleman" cannot do, pick a pocket, cheat at cards,--Victor
de Mauleon would have refused the crown. He would not have refused on
account of any laws of morality affecting the foundations of the
social system, but from the pride of his own personality. "I, Victor
de Mauleon! I pick a pocket! I cheat at cards! I!" But when something
incalculably worse for the interests of society than picking a pocket
or cheating at cards was concerned; when for the sake either of private
ambition or political experiment hitherto untested, and therefore very
doubtful, the peace and order and happiness of millions might be exposed
to the release of the most savage passions, rushing on revolutionary
madness or civil massacre, then this French dare-devil would have been
just as unscrupulous as any English philosopher whom a metropolitan
borough might elect as its representative. The system of the empire was
in the way of Victor de Mauleon,--in the way of his private ambition, in
the way of his political dogmas; and therefore it must be destroyed, no
matter what nor whom it crushed beneath its ruins. He was one of those
plotters of revolutions not uncommon in democracies, ancient and modern,
who invoke popular agencies with the less scruple because they have a
supreme contempt for the populace. A man with mental powers equal to De
Mauleon's, and who sincerely loves the people and respects the grandeur
of aspiration with which, in the great upheaving of their masses, they
so often contrast the irrational credulities of their ignorance and
the blind fury of their wrath, is always exceedingly loath to pass the
terrible gulf that divides reform from revolution. He knows how rarely
it happens that genuine liberty is not disarmed in the passage, and what
sufferings must be undergone by those who live by their labour during
the dismal intervals between the sudden destruction of one form of
society and the gradual settlement of another. Such