according to conscience? This is the English fashion, a fashion to be
treated, within its own sphere, with the highest respect; for its
success, within its own sphere, has been prodigious. But what is law in
one place is not law in another; what is law here to-day is not law even
here to-morrow; and as for conscience, what is binding on one man's
conscience is not binding on another's. The old woman[28] who threw her
stool at the head of the surpliced minister in St. Giles's Church at
Edinburgh obeyed an impulse to which millions of the human race may be
permitted to remain strangers. But the prescriptions of reason are
absolute, unchanging, of universal validity; _to count by tens is the
easiest way of counting_--that is a proposition of which every one, from
here to the Antipodes, feels the force; at least I should say so if we
did not live in a country where it is not impossible that any morning we
may find a letter in the _Times_ declaring that a decimal coinage is an
absurdity. That a whole nation should have been penetrated with an
enthusiasm for pure reason, and with an ardent zeal for making its
prescriptions triumph, is a very remarkable thing, when we consider how
little of mind, or anything so worthy and quickening as mind, comes into
the motives which alone, in general, impel great masses of men. In spite
of the extravagant direction given to this enthusiasm, in spite of the
crimes and follies in which it lost itself, the French Revolution
derives from the force, truth, and universality of the ideas which it
took for its law, and from the passion with which it could inspire a
multitude for these ideas, a unique and still living power; it is,--it
will probably long remain,--the greatest, the most animating event in
history. And as no sincere passion for the things of the mind, even
though it turn out in many respects an unfortunate passion, is ever
quite thrown away and quite barren of good, France has reaped from hers
one fruit--the natural and legitimate fruit though not precisely the
grand fruit she expected: she is the country in Europe where _the