Danton; I suppose because it is easier to imagine the splendour of
liberty when a subject race throws off a foreign yoke.

So the history of rebellion involves us in a mesh of contradictions.
Rebels have been generally regarded as deserving more terrible penalties
than other criminals, yet all the world loves a rebel, at a distance.
Nationalist rebellions are crushed with even greater ferocity than the
internal rebellions of a State, and yet the leaders of Nationalist
rebellions are regarded by the common world with a special affection of
hero-worship. Obviously, we are here confronted with two different
standards of conduct. On one side is the standard of Government, the
States and Law, which denounces the rebel, and especially the
Nationalist rebel, as the worst of sinners; on the other side we have
the standard of the individual, the soul and liberty, which loves a
rebel, especially a Nationalist rebel, and denies that he is a sinner at
all.

Let us leave the Nationalist rebel, whose justification is now almost
universally admitted (except by the dominant Power), even if he is
unsuccessful, and consider only the rebel inside the State--the rebel
against his own Leviathan--whose position is far more dubious. Job's
Leviathan appears to have been a more fearsome and powerful beast than
the elephant, but in India the elephant is taken as the symbol of
wisdom, and when an Indian boy goes in for a municipal examination, he
prays to the elephant-god for assistance. Now the ideal State of the
elephant is the herd, and yet this herd of wisdom sometimes develops a
rebel or "rogue" who seems to be striving after some fresh manner of
existence and works terrible havoc among the elephantine conventions.
Usually the herd combines to kill him and there is an end of the matter.
Yet I sometimes think that the occasional and inexplicable appearance of