Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/130

116 knowledge of history; the employment of the courts of law as a means of coercing a political adversary arouses universal indignation, and people with ordinary common sense hold that it ruins all judicial conceptions.

Sumner Maine points out that the relationships of governments and citizens have been completely overhauled since the end of the eighteenth century; formerly the State was always supposed to be good and wise, consequently any attempt to hinder its working was looked upon as a grave offence; the Liberal system supposes, on the contrary, that the citizen, left free, chooses the better part, and that he exercises the first of his rights in criticising the Government, which has passed from the position of master to that of servant. Maine does not say what is the cause of this transformation; the cause seems to me to be above all of an economic order. In the new state of things political crime is an act of simple revolt which cannot carry with it disgrace of any kind, which is combated for reasons of prudence, but which no longer merits the name of crime, for its author in no way resembles a criminal.

We are not perhaps better, more human, more sensitive to the misfortunes of others than were the men of '93; and I should even be rather disposed to assert that the country is probably less moral than it was at that time; but we are no longer dominated to the same extent that our fathers were by this superstition of the God-State, to which they sacrificed so many victims. The ferocity of the members of the National Convention is easily explained by the influence of the conceptions which the Third Estate derived from the detestable practices of the Old Régime.