wherefore, as they must have been written by himself, or under his
personal supervision, he brazenly and deliberately lied. His good faith
was obviously suspected, and this suspicion caused disastrous results. To
support his lie Moses caused three thousand unsuspecting and trusting men
to be murdered in cold blood, whose only crime was that they would have
preferred another leadership to his, and because, had they been able to
effect their purpose, they would have disappointed his ambition.

To follow Moses further in the course which optimism enforced upon him
would be tedious, as it would be to recapitulate the story which has
already been told. It suffices to say shortly that, at every camp, he had
to sink to deeper depths of fraud, deception, lying, and crime in order to
maintain his credit. It might be that, as at Meribah, it was only claiming
for himself a miracle which he knew he could not work, and for claiming
which, instead of giving the credit to God, he openly declared he deserved
and must receive punishment; or it might be some impudent quackery, like
the brazen serpent, which at least was harmless; or it might have been
complicated combinations which suggest a deeper shade; as, for example,
the outbreak of the plague, after Korah's rebellion, which bears the
aspect of a successful effort at intimidation to support his own wavering
credit. But the result was always the same. Moses had promised that the
supernatural power he pretended to control should sustain him and give
victory. Possibly, when he started on the exodus he verily believed that
such a power existed, was amenable and could be constrained to intervene.
He found that he had been mistaken on all these heads, and when he
accepted these facts as final, nothing remained for him but suicide, as
has been related. It only remains to glance, for a single moment, at what
befell, when he had gone, the society he had organized on the optimistic
principle of the approach of human beings toward perfection. During the
period of the Judges, when "there was no king in Israel, but every man did