work; which is capable more or less of madness, whether solitary
or epidemic. It may be very active; it may be very quick at
catching at new and grand ideas--all the more quick, perhaps, on
account of its own secret malaise and self-discontent; but it will
be irritable, spasmodic, hysterical. It will be apt to mistake
capacity of talk for capacity of action, excitement for
earnestness, virulence for force, and, too often; cruelty for
justice. It will lose manful independence, individuality,
originality; and when men act, they will act from the
consciousness of personal weakness, like sheep rushing over a
hedge, leaning against each other, exhorting each other to be
brave, and swaying about in mobs and masses. These were the
intellectual weaknesses which, as I read history, followed on
physical degradation in Imperial Rome, in Alexandria, in
Byzantium. Have we not seen them reappear, under fearful forms,
in Paris but the other day?

I do not blame; I do not judge. My theory, which I hold, and
shall hold, to be fairly founded on a wide induction, forbids me
to blame and to judge; because it tells me that these defects are
mainly physical; that those who exhibit them are mainly to be
pitied, as victims of the sins or ignorance of their forefathers.

But it tells me too, that those who, professing to be educated
men, and therefore bound to know better, treat these physical
phenomena as spiritual, healthy, and praiseworthy; who even
exasperate them, that they may make capital out of the weaknesses
of fallen man, are the most contemptible and yet the most
dangerous of public enemies, let them cloak their quackery under
whatsoever patriotic, or scientific, or even sacred words.