ns, risen at length into
the Pythian mood, had stood up simultaneously to say, with a sound which
goes through far lands and times, that this Untruth of an Existence had
become insupportable. O ye Hypocrisies and Speciosities, Royal
mantles, Cardinal plushcloaks, ye Credos, Formulas, Respectabilities,
fair-painted Sepulchres full of dead men's bones,--behold, ye appear to
us to be altogether a Lie. Yet our Life is not a Lie; yet our Hunger
and Misery is not a Lie! Behold we lift up, one and all, our Twenty-five
million right-hands; and take the Heavens, and the Earth and also the
Pit of Tophet to witness, that either ye shall be abolished, or else we
shall be abolished!

No inconsiderable Oath, truly; forming, as has been often said, the most
remarkable transaction in these last thousand years. Wherefrom likewise
there follow, and will follow, results. The fulfilment of this Oath;
that is to say, the black desperate battle of Men against their whole
Condition and Environment,--a battle, alas, withal, against the Sin
and Darkness that was in themselves as in others: this is the Reign
of Terror. Transcendental despair was the purport of it, though not
consciously so. False hopes, of Fraternity, Political Millennium, and
what not, we have always seen: but the unseen heart of the whole, the
transcendental despair, was not false; neither has it been of no effect.
Despair, pushed far enough, completes the circle, so to speak; and
becomes a kind of genuine productive hope again.

Doctrine of Fraternity, out of old Catholicism, does, it is true, very
strangely in the vehicle of a Jean-Jacques Evangel, suddenly plump down
out of its cloud-firmament; and from a theorem determine to make itself
a practice. But just so do all creeds, intentions, customs, knowledges,
thoughts and things, which the French have, suddenly plump down;
Catholicism, Classicism, Sentimentalism, Cannibalism: all isms that make
up Man in France, are rushing and roaring in that gulf; and the theorem
has become a practice, and whatsoever cannot swim sinks. Not Evangelist
Jean-Jacques alone; there is not a Village Schoolmaster but has
contributed his quota: do we not 'thou' one another, according to the
Free Peoples of Antiquity? The French Patriot, in red phrygian nightcap
of Liberty, christens his poor little red infant Cato,--Censor, or
else of Utica. Gracchus has become Baboeuf and edits Newspapers;
Mutius Scaevola, Cordwainer of that ilk, presides in the