Morning journal and courier., 1884-11-13
socialism as Government.


 A dozen leaders on the committee of pub limited authority in their own hands; but, admitted by them, their authority is deri- vative. The convention makes them it's del egates; their precarious title has to be re- newed monthly; a turn of the majority may sweep them and their work away tomorrow; an insurrection of the people, whom they have familiarized with insurrection, may to- morrow sweep them away, their work and their majority. They maintain only a dis puted limited and transient ascendency over their adherents. They are not military chief tains like Cromwell and Napoleon generals of an army obeyed without murmur-but plain speech-makers, at the mercy of an au- dience that sits in judgment on them. There is no discipline in this audience; every Jaco- bin by his principles remains independent; if he accepts leaders, it is with regard to their worth to him; selecting them he pleases, he is free to change them when he pleases; his trust in them is intermittent, his loyalty provisional, and as his adhesion depends on a mere preference, he always reserves the right to discard the favorite of to-day as he has discarded the favorite of yesterday In this audience there is no such thing as subor- dination; the lowest demagogue, any subal- tern brawler, Hebert or Jacques Roux, who is ambitious to step out of the ranks, outyies the charlatans in office in order to obtain their places. Even with complete and last ing ascendency over an organized band of docile supporters, the Jacobin leaders would | be feeble for lack of reliable and competent 1 instruments, for they have but very few par | tisans other than those of doubtful problty l and of notorious incapacity. Cromwell had l around him to carry out the Puritan pro gramme the moral elite of the nation, an army of rigorists with narrow consclences, | but much more strict toward themselves | o41,o l and who never swore, who never indulged | for moment in sensuality or 1dleness, who | forbade themselves every act of omission or | commission about which they held any scru- l pies; the most honest, the most temperate, | the most laborious and the most preserving 1 of mankind; the only ones capable of laying 1 the foundations of that practical morality on l which England and the United States still | subsist at the present day. Around Peter | the Great, in carrying out his European pro | gramme, stood the intellectual elite of the country, an imported staff of men of ability associated with natives of moderate ability, every well-taught resident foreigner and in digenous Russian, the only ones able to or l ganize schools and public institutions, to set up vast central and regular system of ad- ministration, to assign ranks according to
 service and merit-in short, to erect on the
 snow and mud of shapeless barbarism a conservatory where civilization, transplanted like an exotic tree, might grow and gradual ly become acclimated Around Couthon, St.
 Just and Robespierre, with the exception of
 certain men devoted not to Utopianism but to the country, and who, like Carnot, con-
 form to the system in order to save France,
 there ara only secretaries eager to carry out the Jacobin programme, men 50 short-slght-
 ed as not clearly to comprehend it's fallaciess, or so fanatical as to accept it's horrors, pack
 of social outcasts and self-constituted states
 men, infatuated through faculties incom-
 mensurate with the parts they play, unsound
 incompetent, boundless in ambition, with
 perverted, eallous or deadened consciences,
 deluded by sophistry, cold-blooded through
 vain-glory and vicious through crime, impu-
 nifty and success.