Elysees and the Bois de Boulogne. But you are a serious person; you prefer to look behind the scenes of world history rather than behind the scenes of the Opera. . . . Here you have a parliament, even two. What more do you want? . . . With what envy and heart-ache I used to listen to people who had come home from Europe in the 'thirties, as though they had robbed me of everything that they had seen and I had not. They, too, had not been bored, but had great hopes, some of Odilon Barrot, some of Cobden. You, too, must learn not to be bored ; and in any case be a little consistent; and if you still feel dull, try to find the cause.
You may find that your demands are trivial-then you must take treatment for this; it is the boredom of idleness, of emptiness, of not knowing how to find your real self. And perhaps you will find something else: that you are bored because Paris and London have no answer to make to the yearnings that are growing stronger and stronger in the heart and brain of the man
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of to-day-which does not in the least prevent their standing for the highest development and most brilliant result of the past, and being rich conclusions to a rich period.
I have said this a dozen times, but it is impossible to avoid repetitions. Persons of experience know this. I once spoke to Proudhon of the fact that there often appeared in his journal articles which were almost identical, with only slight variations.
'And do you imagine,' Proudhon answered, 'that once a thing has been said, it is enough? That a new idea will be accepted straight off? You are mistaken. It has to be dinned into people, it has to be repeated, repeated over and over again, in order that the mind may no longer be surprised by it, that it may be not merely understood, but assimilated, and obtain real rights of citizenship in the brain.'
Proudhon was perfectly right. There are two or three ideas which are particularly dear to me ; I have been repeating them for a bout fifteen years; fact upon fact confirms them with unnecessary abundance. Part of what I expected has come to pass and the other part is coming to pass before our eyes; yet these ideas arc as outrageous and unaccepted as they were before.
And, what is most mortifying, people seem to understand you; they agree, but your ideas remain like aliens in their heads, ahvays irrelevant, never passing into that spontaneous part of consciousness and the moral bPing which as a rule lies at the undisputed foundation of our acts and opinions.
It is owing to this duality that people who apparently are highly developed are constantly startled by the unexpected, are caught unawares, rebel against the inevitable, struggle with the irresistible, pass by what is springing into life, and apply all sorts of allopathies and homeopathies to those who arc at their last gasp. They know that their watch was properly set but, like the late 'unlamented' Kleinmikhel,22 cannot grasp that the meridian is not the same.
Pedantry and scholasticism prevent men from grasping things with simple, lively understanding more than do superstition and ignorance. \\'ith the latter the instincts are left, hardly realised, but trustworthy; moreover, ignorance does not exclude passionate Pnthusiasm. nor do!'s supPrstition <•xcludt• inconsistency.
But pPdantrv is alwavs trut' to itsPlf.
At the time of tlw Italian war a decent, worthy professor
�2 K l <>inmikhPI. Count Pi'tr Andr<>ve\"ich ( 1 i93- 1 8fi9 ) . S!'nator a nd membPr of the Council of Still<'. His ci ismissal i n Ortob .. ,· 1 8-1-1 \\'aS n•cein�J
with great sa tisfaction in broad circles of thP Russian public. ( A .S. )
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lectured on the great triumphs of 'international law,' describing how the principles once sketched big by Hugo Grotius had developed and entered into the consciousness of nations and governments, how questions which had in old times been decided by rivers of blood and the miseries of entire provinces, of whole generations, were now settled, like civil disputes between private persons, on the principles of national conscience.
Who, apart from some old professional condottieri, would not agree with the professor that this is one of the greatest victories of humanity and culture over brute violence? The trouble is Iiot that the lecturer's judgment is wrong, but that humanity is very far from having gained this victory.
While the professor in eloquent words was inspiring his young audience to these W eltanschauungen, very different commentaries on international law were taking place on the fields of Magenta and Solferino. It would have been all the harder for any Amphictyonic Councils to avert the Italian war because there was no international cause for it-since there was no subject in d ispute. Napoleon waged this war as a remedial measure to calm down the French by the gymnastics of liberation and the shocks of victory. What Grotius or Vattel23 could have solved such a problem? How was it possible to avert a war which was essential for domestic interests? If it had not been Austria the French would have had to beat somebody else. One can only rejoice that it was just Austrians who incurred it.
Then, India, Pekin-war waged by democrats to maintain the slavery of the blacks, war waged by republicans to obtain the slavery of political unity. And the professor goes on lecturing; his audience are touched; they fancy that they have heard the last creak of the church gates in the cathedral of Janus, that the warriors have laid down their weapons, put •on crowns of myrtle and taken up the distaff, that the armies are demobilised and are tilling the fields . . . . And all this at the very time when England was covered with volunteers, when at every step you met a uniform, when every shopkeeper had a fire-arm, when the French and Austrian armies stood with lighted matches, and even a prince-1 think it was of Hesse Cassel-placed on a military footing and armed with revolvers the two hussars who had from the time of the Congress of Vienna ridden peacefully and unarmed behind his carriage.
If war blazed up again-and that depends on a thousand 23 Vattel, Emmerich de ( 1 71 4-67), a Swiss writer, author of Traite du Droit des Gens. (Tr.)
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accidents, on one well-timed shot-in Rome or on the frontier of Lombardy, it would spill over in a sea of blood from Warsaw to London. The professor would be surprised; the professor would be pained. But one would have thought he should not be surprised nor pained. The trend of history is not a hole and corner business! The misfortune of the doctrinaires is that they shut their eyes when arguing so that they may not see their opponent is I\'ature itself, history itself.
To complete the absurdity we ought not to lose sight of the fact that in abstract logic the professor is right, and that if not a hundred but a hundred million men had grasped the principles of Grotius and Vattel, they would not slaughter each other either for the sake of exercise or for the sake of a bit of land. But the misfortune is that unc}pr the present political regime only a hundred and not a hundred million men can understand the principles of Grotius and Vattel.