surmounted that difficulty soon destroyed all those that lay in
their way who did not. And then they a themselves were caught in
their own yoke. The customary discipline, which could only be
imposed on any early men by terrible sanctions, continued with those
sanctions, and killed out of the whole society the propensities to
variation which are the principle--of progress. Experience shows how
incredibly difficult it is to get men really to encourage the
principle of originality. They will admit it in theory, but in
practice the old error--the error which arrested a hundred
civilisations--returns again. Men are too fond of their own life,
too credulous of the completeness of their own ideas, too angry at
the pain of new thoughts, to be able to bear easily with a changing
existence; or else, having new ideas, they want to enforce them on
mankind--to make them heard, and admitted, and obeyed before, in
simple competition with other ideas, they would ever be so
naturally. At this very moment there are the most rigid Comtists
teaching that we ought to be governed by a hierarchy--a combination
of savans orthodox in science. Yet who can doubt that Comte would
have been hanged by his own hierarchy; that his essor materiel,
which was in fact troubled by the 'theologians and metaphysicians'
of the Polytechnic School, would have been more impeded by the
government he wanted to make? And then the secular Comtists, Mr.
Harrison and Mr. Beesly, who want to 'Frenchify the English
institutions'--that is, to introduce here an imitation of the
Napoleonic system, a dictatorship founded on the proletariat--who
can doubt that if both these clever writers had been real Frenchmen
they would have been irascible anti-Bonapartists, and have been sent
to Cayenne long ere now? The wish of these writers is very natural.
They want to 'organise society,' to erect a despot who will do what
they like, and work out their ideas; but any despot will do what he