THE Marquis de Condorcet was one of the noblest characters among the
small group of honest enthusiasts who were responsible for the outbreak
of the great French Revolution. He had devoted his life to the cause
of the poor and the unfortunate. He had been one of the assistants of
d'Alembert and Diderot when they wrote their famous Encyclopedie. During
the first years of the Revolution he had been the leader of the Moderate
wing of the Convention.
His tolerance, his kindliness, his stout common sense, had made him an
object of suspicion when the treason of the king and the court
clique had given the extreme radicals their chance to get hold of the
government and kill their opponents. Condorcet was declared "hors de
loi," or outlawed, an outcast who was henceforth at the mercy of every
true patriot. His friends offered to hide him at their own peril.
Condorcet refused to accept their sacrifice. He escaped and tried to
reach his home, where he might be safe. After three nights in the
open, torn and bleeding, he entered an inn and asked for some food. The
suspicious yokels searched him and in his pockets they found a copy of
Horace, the Latin poet. This showed that their prisoner was a man of
gentle breeding and had no business upon the highroads at a time when
every educated person was regarded as an enemy of the Revolutionary
state. They took Condorcet and they bound him and they gagged him and
they threw him into the village lock-up, but in the morning when the
soldiers came to drag him back to Paris and cut his head off, behold! he
was dead.
This man who had given all and had received nothing had good reason to
despair of the human race. But he has written a few sentences which ring
as true to-day as they did one hundred and thirty years ago. I repeat
them here for your benefit.
"Nature has set no limits to our hopes," he wrote, "and the picture of
the human race, now freed from its chains and marching with a firm tread
on the road of truth and virtue and happiness, offers to the philosopher
a spectacle which consoles him for the errors, for the crimes and the
injustices which still pollute and afflict this earth."
The world has just passed through an agony of pain compared to which the
French Revolution was a mere incident. The shock has been so great that
it has killed the last spark of hope in the breasts of millions of
men. They were chanting a hymn of progress, and four years of slaughter
followed their prayers for peace. "Is it worth while," so they ask,
"to work and slave for the benefit of creatures who have not yet passed
beyond the stage of the earliest cave men?"
There is but one answer.