Page:Instead of a Book, Tucker.djvu/44

28 Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not covet or calumniate. For the Eternal ordains it, and it is the Eternal who has made you what you are. The Eternal is alone sovereign, alone wise, alone worthy; the Eternal punishes and rewards. It is in the power of the Eternal to render you happy or unhappy at his will. All legislations have adopted this style; all, speaking to man, employ the sovereign formula. The Hebrew commands in the future, the Latin in the imperative, the Greek in the infinitive. The moderns do not otherwise. The tribune of the parliament-house is a Sinai as infallible and as terrible as that of Moses; whatever the law may be, from whatever lips it may come, it is sacred once it has been proclaimed by that prophetic trumpet, which with us is the majority. Thou shalt not assemble. Thou shalt not print. Thou shalt not read. Thou shalt respect thy representatives and thy officials, which the hazard of the ballot or the good pleasure of the State shall have given you. Thou shalt obey the laws which they in their wisdom shall have made. Thou shalt pay thy taxes faithfully. And thou shalt love the Government, thy Lord and thy God, with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind, because the Government knows better than thou what thou art, what thou art worth, what is good for thee, and because it has the power to chastise those who disobey its commandments, as well as to reward unto the fourth generation those who make themselves agreeable to it. With the Revolution it is quite different. The search for first causes and for final causes is eliminated from economic science as from the natural sciences. The idea of Progress replaces, in philosophy, that of the Absolute. Revolution succeeds Revelation. Reason, assisted by Experience, discloses to man the laws of Nature and Society; then it says to him:— These laws are those of necessity itself. No man has made them; no man imposes them upon you. They have been