eir
thrones, the cardinals under their hats, the judges in the shadow of
their guillotines, the captains on their war-horses, were thrown into
commotion; but he who had any interest whatever in what was about to
disappear; he who was cultivating for his own profit a social fiction,
and had an abuse to let out on hire; he who was guardian of some
falsehood, doorkeeper of some prejudice, or farmer of some
superstition; he who was taking advantage of another, or dealing in
usury, oppression and falsehood; he who sold by false weights, from
those who falsify a balance to those who falsify the Bible; from the
cheating merchant to the cheating priest; from those who manipulate
figures to those who traffic in miracles,--all, from the Jew banker who
feels that he is more or less Catholic, to the bishop who becomes more
or less of a Jew,--all the men of the past inclined their heads towards
one another and trembled.

This grave, which was gaping, and into which had nearly fallen all the
fictions--their treasure--which have weighed upon men for so many ages,
they resolved to fill up. They determined to wall it up, to pile rocks
and stones upon it, and to erect upon the pile a gibbet, and to hang
upon this gibbet, all bleeding and dejected, that mighty culprit,
Truth.

They determined, once for all, to make an end of the spirit of freedom
and emancipation, and to drive back and repress for ever the upward
tendency of mankind.

The enterprise was formidable. What the nature of it was we have
already indicated, more than once, in this book and elsewhere.

To undo the labour of twenty generations; to kill in the nineteenth
century, by strangulation, three centuries, the sixteenth, the
seventeenth, and the eighteenth, that is to say, Luther, Descartes, and
Voltaire, religious scrutiny, philosophical scrutiny, universal
scrutiny; to crush throughout all Europe this immense vegetation of
free thought, here a tender blade, there a sturdy oak; to marry the
knout and the holy-water-sprinkler; to put more of Spain in the South,
and more of Russia in the North; to resuscitate all they could of the
Inquisition, and to stifle all they could of intelligence; to stultify
youth, in other words to brutalize the future; to make the world a
witness of the _auto-da-fe_ of ideas; to throw down the tribune, to
suppress the newspaper, the placard, the book, the spoken word, the
cry, the whisper, the breath; to make silence; to pursue thought into