how men are bound together by mutual obligations; he shows them the harmony of private and of public interests, and ends by making them appreciate of the beauty of virtue.[11] All utter shouts of joy, embrace each other, gather round the speaker and elect him chief magistrate; dancing is going on under the branches in the background, and henceforth happiness on earth is fully established. — This is no exaggeration.  The National Assembly addresses the nation in harangues of this style.  For many years the government speaks to the people as it would to one of Gessner’s shepherds.  The peasants are entreated not to burn castles because it is painful for their good king to see such sights.  They are exhorted “to surprise him with their virtues in order that he may be the sooner rewarded for his own."[12] At the height of the Jacquerie tumults the sages of the day seem to think they are living in a state of pastoral simplicity, and that with an air on the flute they may restore to its fold the howling pack of bestial animosities and unchained appetites

III.  Our true human nature.

The inadequacy and fragility of reason in man. — The rarity and inadequacy of reason in humanity. — Subordination of reason in human conduct. — Brutal and dangerous forces. — The nature and utility of government.  Government impossible under the new theory.

It is a sad thing to fall asleep in a sheep-shed and, on awakening, to find the sheep transformed into wolves; and yet, in the event of a revolution that is what we may expect.  What we call reason in Man is not an innate endowment, basic and enduring, but a tardy acquisition and a fragile composition.  The slightest physiological knowledge will tell us that it is a precarious act of balance, dependent on the no less greater instability of the brain, nerves, circulation and digestion.  Take women that are hungry and men that have been drinking; place a thousand of these together, and let them excite each other with their cries, their anxieties, and the contagious reaction of their ever-deepening emotions; it will not be long before you find them a crowd of dangerous maniacs.  This becomes evident, and abundantly so, after 1789. — Now, consult psychology.  The simplest mental operation, a sensuous perception, is an act of memory, the appliance of a name, an ordinary act of judgment is the play of complicated mechanism, the joint and final result of several millions of wheels which, like those of a clock,[13] turn and propel blindly, each for itself, each through its own force, and each kept in place and in functional activity by a system of balance and compensation.[14] If the hands mark the hour with any degree of accuracy it is due to a wonderful if not miraculous conjunction, while hallucination, delirium and monomania, ever at the door, are always ready to enter it.  Properly speaking Man is mad, as the body is sick, by nature; the health of our mind, like the health of our organs,