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If the utmost dreams of science, and all the moral and political aims of Girondinism were realized, if the foundations of life and of being were laid bare, if the curve of every star were traced, its laws determined, and its structure analysed, if the revolutions of this globe from its first hour, and the annals of all the systems that wheel in space, were by some miracle brought within our scrutiny it still would leave the spirit unsatisfied as when these crystal walls did first environ its infinitude.
And if not one man of supreme genius then living or in after ages has condemned Napoleon, if the poets of that time, Goethe and Manzoni, Poushkine, Byron, and Lermontoff, made themselves votaries of his fame, it was because they felt already what two generations have made a commonplace, that his hopes had been their hopes, his disillusion their disillusion; that in political freedom no more than in religious freedom can the peace of the world be found; that Girondinism was no final evangel; that to man's soul freedom can never be an end in itself, but only the means to an end.
As Mirabeau, the intellectual Catiline of his age, is the protagonist of Rebellion, that principle which has drawn the deepest utterances from the world-soul, from Job to Prometheus and Farinata, so Condorcet, whose countenance in its high and gentle benevolence seems the very expression of that bienfaisance which the Abbé de Saint-Pierre made fashionable, may be styled the high-priest of Girondinism, and he carries his faith beyond the grave, hallowing the altar of Freedom with his blood.
The history of Europe for the thirty-three years following the abdication at the Elysée is a conflict between the two principles of Absolutism and Liberty, represented now by the cry for constitutionalism and the Nation, now by a return to Girondinism and the watchword of Humanity. In theory the divine right of peoples was arrayed against the divine right of kings.
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