Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/58

 52 sockets of the young heir, her fragile but deeply-loved charge! Thus it is a woman of the people who, in the midst of the corrupt and dying society, alone preserves the sacred traditions of sympathy and self-sacrifice.

The cruel tyranny of Pancras and the mob is also full of important lessons. From it we gather that despotism does not consist in the fact of the whole power being vested in the hands of one or many, but in the fact that the government is without love for the governed, whatever may be its constitutional form. One or many, an assembly of legislators or a king, an oligarchy or a mob, may be equally despotic, if Love be not the ruling principle!