Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/474

458 modern Attila who was guilty of this bloodshed is shown by decorating rooms with portraits and busts of him. See the beliefs which these respective feelings imply:

These are the antithetical propositions tacitly implied in the opinions that have been current in England about the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Only by acceptance of such propositions can these opinions be defended. Such have been the emotions of men that, until quite recently, it has been the habit to speak with detestation of the one set of events, and to speak of the other set of events in words betraying admiration. Nay, even now these feelings are but partially qualified. While the names of the leading actors in the Reign of Terror are names of execration, we speak of Napoleon as "the Great," and Englishmen worship him by visiting his tomb and taking off their hats!

How, then, with such perverting emotions, is it possible to take rational views of sociological facts? Forming, as men do, such astoundingly false conceptions of the relative amounts of evils and the relative characters of motives, how can they judge truly among institutions and actions, past or present? Clearly, minds thus swayed by disproportionate hates and admirations cannot frame those balanced