The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE EQUINOX a slave, he would have become an actor or a gladiator, and would not have burned Rome: would it be to him that one should be grateful for that? Nero was the accomplice of the whole Roman people, and those who should have prevented them incurred the whole re- sponsibility for the frenzies of this monster. Seneca, Burrhus, Thrasea, Corbulon, theirs is the real guilt of that fearful reign ; great men who were either selfish or incapable! The only thing they knew was how to die. If one of the bears of the Zoological Gardens escaped and devoured several people, would one blame him or his keepers ? Whoever frees himself from the common errors of mankind is obliged to pay a ransom proportional to the sum of these errors: Socrates pays for Aneitus, and Jesus was obliged to suffer a torment whose terror was equal to the whole treason of Judas. Thus, by paying the debts of fatality, hard-won liberty purchases the empire of the world; it is hers to bind and to unbind. God has put in her hands the keys of Heaven and of Hell. You men who abandon brutes to themselves wish them to devour you. The rabble, slaves of fatality, can only enjoy liberty by absolute obedience to the will of free men; they ought to work for those who are responsible for them. But when the brute governs brutes, when the blind leads the blind, when the leader is as subject to fatality as the masses, what must one expect? What but the most shocking catastrophes? In that we shall never be disappointed. By admitting the anarchical dogmas of 1789, Louis XVI 254