y opinion, irrefutable, with the logic which takes no account of
facts, and which only takes account of its own principle and of itself.
So they will all argue to-morrow, if they continue, as it is probable
they will continue, to be very excellent dialecticians.

Will they go back to the premises and say, that if the sovereignty of
the people and equality lead logically and imperatively to these
conclusions, it is perhaps because the sovereignty of the people and
equality are false ideas, and because these conclusions prove them to be
false? This is a course not likely to be taken, for the sovereignty of
the people and the principle of equality are something more than general
ideas, they are sentiments.

They are sentiments which have become ideas, as is the case doubtless
with all general ideas, and they are sentiments of great strength. The
sovereignty of the people is the truth for him who believes in it,
because it ought to be true, because it is a thing as full of majesty
for him as was Caesar in all his pomp for the ancient Roman, or Louis
XIV. in all his glory for the man of the seventeenth century.

Equality is truth for him who believes, because it ought to be true,
because it is justice, and because it would be infamous if justice and
truth were not one. For the democrat, the world has ever been rising
gradually, since its creation, towards the sovereignty of the people and
the doctrine of equality; the latter contains the former, the former is
destined to found the latter and has this mission for its purpose in
life; together they constitute civilisation, and if they are not
attained, there is a relapse into barbarism.

They are dogmas of faith. A dogma is an overmastering sentiment which
has found expression in a formula. From these two dogmas everything that
can be deduced without breach of logic is truth which it is our right
and duty to proclaim.

We must add that the schoolmaster is urged in this same direction by
sentiments of a less general character, which nevertheless have an
influence of their own. He is placed in his commune in direct opposition
to the priest, the only person very often who is, like himself, in that
place a man of some little education. Hence rivalry and a struggle for
influence. Now the priest, by a series of historical incidents, is a
more or less warm partisan sometimes of monarchy but almost always of
aristocracy. He is a member of a body that once was an estate of the
rea