law in another; what is law here
to-day is not law even here to-morrow; and as for conscience, what is
binding on one man's conscience is not binding on another's; the old woman
who threw her stool at the head of the surpliced minister in the Tron
Church at Edinburgh obeyed an impulse to which millions of the human race
may be permitted to remain strangers. But the prescriptions of reason are
absolute, unchanging, of universal validity; _to count by tens is the
easiest way of counting_--that is a proposition of which everyone, from
here to the Antipodes, feels the force; at least, I should say so if we
did not live in a country where it is not impossible that any morning we
may find a letter in the "Times" declaring that a decimal coinage is an
absurdity. That a whole nation should have been penetrated with an
enthusiasm for pure reason, and with an ardent zeal for making its
prescriptions triumph, is a very remarkable thing, when we consider how
little of mind, or anything so worthy and quickening as mind, comes into
the motives which alone, in general, _impel_ great masses of men. In spite
of the extravagant direction given to this enthusiasm, in spite of the
crimes and follies in which it lost itself, the French Revolution derives
from the force, truth, and universality of the ideas which it took for its
law, and from the passion with which it could inspire a multitude for
these ideas, a unique and still living power; it is--it will probably long
remain--the greatest, the most animating event in history. And as no
sincere passion for the things of the mind, even though it turn out in
many respects an unfortunate passion, is ever quite thrown away and quite
barren of good, France has reaped from hers one fruit, the natural and
legitimate fruit, though not precisely the grand fruit she expected: she
is the country in Europe where _the people_ is most alive.

But the mania for giving an immediate political and practical application
to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal. Here an Englishman is in
his element: on this theme we can all go for hours. And all we are in the
habit of saying on it has undoubtedly a great deal of truth. Ideas cannot
be too much prized in and for themselves, cannot be too much lived with;
but to transport them abruptly into the world of politics and practice,
violently to revolutionize this world to their bidding--that is quite
another thing. There is the world of ideas and there is the wo