e subject of all history, awoke to the knowledge of
their wrongs and of their power, and rose up to avenge the past.
History is also restitution. Authorities tyrannised and nations
suffered; but the Revolution is the advent of justice, and the central
fact in the experience of mankind. Michelet proclaims that at his
touch the hollow idols were shattered and exposed, the carrion kings
appeared, unsheeted and unmasked. He says that he has had to swallow
too much anger and too much woe, too many vipers and too many kings;
and he writes sometimes as if such diet disagreed with him. His
imagination is filled with the cruel sufferings of man, and he hails
with a profound enthusiasm the moment when the victim that could not
die, in a furious act of retribution, avenged the martyrdom of a
thousand years. The acquisition of rights, the academic theory,
touches him less than the punishment of wrong. There is no forgiveness
for those who resist the people rising in the consciousness of its
might. What is good proceeds from the mass, and what is bad from
individuals. Mankind, ignorant in regard to nature, is a righteous
judge of the affairs of man. The light which comes to the learned from
reflection comes to the unlearned more surely by natural inspiration;
and power is due to the mass by reason of instinct, not by reason of
numbers. They are right by dispensation of heaven, and there is no
pity for their victims, if you remember the days of old. Michelet had
no patience with those who sought the pure essence of the Revolution
in religion. He contrasts the agonies with which the Church aggravated
the punishment of death with the swift mercy of the guillotine, and
prefers to fall into Danton's hands rather than into those of Lewis
IX. or Torquemada.

With all this, by the real sincerity of his feeling for the multitude,
by the thoroughness of his view and his intensely expressive language,
he is the most illuminating of the democratic historians. We often
read of men whose lives have been changed because a particular book
has fallen into their hands, or, one might say, because they have
fallen into the hands of a particular book. It is not always a happy
accident; and one feels that things would have gone otherwise with
them if they had examined Sir John Lubbock's List of Best Books, or
what I would rather call the St. Helena library, containing none but
works adequate and adapted to use by the ablest man in the full
maturity of h