Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/729

Rh is useful when it is employed as a remedy—and rightly so." Referring to the unjust laws promulgated against the Catholics under James I, the Englishman says, "Unjust as these stipulations were, the safety of the state rendered them necessary." It is only when such principles are found in the mouth of a terrorist like Marat that their infamous character is fully realized. "Before this supreme law," he wrote, alluding to "the safety of the people," and in justification of the crimes that he and his partisans committed, "all other laws should be as naught. To save the country all means are good, all means are just, all means are meritorious."

M. Proal's exposition of the direful fruits of such a political philosophy is scholarly and complete. Of the eleven chapters in his book, nine of them are devoted to a citation of some of the more striking crimes of ancient and modern history, particularly that of France, committed to insure "the safety of the people." They are of great interest and value, including as they do Political Assassination and Tyrannicide, Anarchism, Political Hatreds, Political Hypocrisy, Political Spoliation, Corruption among Politicians, Electoral Corruption, The Corruption of Law and Justice by Politics, and The Corruption of Morals by Politics. The cumulative effect of this mass of facts is irresistible. They make clear, as nothing else can, how politics may poison the whole social fabric—how, indeed, it may produce effects wholly unexpected. "Bad political morals," says M. Proal, "spread to the people; they accustom it to deceit, cruelty, and injustice, and they diminish its loathing for evil. The immorality of those who govern infects sooner or later those who are governed." He tells us that "the Terror rendered cruel even those who fought against it, and it left its mark upon the youth of the higher classes." He tells us further that "the triumph of might makes people lose confidence in right, and destroys their faith in justice." Not only do immoral politics lead to cruelty and greed, but, as M. Proal shows by a number of examples, to intemperance, gluttony, and even sexual laxity. He shows, finally, that by "the creation of privileges" they produce changes in the structure of society. "Undoing the work of God, who gave the same rights to all men," he says, "they have created inequality in the matter of civil and political rights, they have altered the true mutual relations of men, and they have established inequality even in respect to justice."

The only important lesson taught by this demoralization is not the necessity of a scrupulous observance of a rigid code of ethics in political action. Hardly less important is the lesson that all writers and public speakers should possess sound judgment. "I believe," says M. Proal, "that disordered ideas produce moral disorder, that a false thesis may call forth an infinite number of bad actions, that a sophism is often more dangerous to society than a crime." As judge of the Court of Appeal at Aix, before which political criminals had been tried, he had ample opportunity to confirm this view. Reprobation too severe can not, therefore, be visited upon such a writer as M. Renan, who says, "It is better that a people should be immoral than that it should be fanatical." Nor should approval ever be bestowed upon works in glorification of revolution or other forms of violence. They are text-books of political crime. "The historian," said Lamartine, who, with Thiers and Louis Blanc, had been guilty of the offense, "who furnishes crime with an excuse and cruelty with a fallacious pretext, paves the way unawares for future indulgence toward the imitators of these crimes." As to certain newspapers and speakers, with which.