In this audience, there is no such thing as
subordination; the lowest demagogue, any noisy subaltern, a H?bert or
Jacques Roux, aspiring to step out of the ranks, overbidding the
charlatans in office in order to obtain their places. Even with a
complete and lasting ascendancy over an organized band of docile
supporters, the Jacobin leaders would be feeble for lack of reliable
and competent instruments; for they have but very few partisans other
than those of doubtful probity and of notorious incapacity. -
Cromwell had around him, to carry out the puritan program, the moral
?lite of the nation, an army of rigorists, with narrow consciences,
but much more strict towards themselves than towards others, men who
never drank and who never swore, who never indulged for a moment in
sensuality or idleness, who forbade themselves every act of omission
or commission about which they held any scruples, the most honest, the
most temperate, the most laborious and the most persevering of
mankind,[22] the only ones capable of laying the foundations of that
practical morality on which England and the United States still
subsist at the present day. - Around Peter the Great, in carrying out
his European program, stood the intellectual ?lite of the country, an
imported staff of men of ability associated with natives of moderate
ability, every well-taught resident foreigner and indigenous Russian,
the only ones able to organize schools and public institutions, to set
up a vast central and regular system of administration, to assign rank
according to service and merit, in short, to erect on the snow and mud
of a shapeless barbarism a conservatory of civilization which,
transplanted like an exotic tree, grows and gradually becomes
acclimated.
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