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Unworthily have I, the Great President, been entrusted with the great task by the citizens. Owing to my lack of virtue and ability I have not been able fully to transform into deeds what I have desired to accomplish; and I blush to say that I have not realized one ten-thousandth part of my original intention to save the country and the people.
But this radioactivity hardly attains the ten-thousandth part of that presented by uranium, or the ten-millionth of that appertaining to radium. Two other bodies, polonium and actinium, the one characterised by the special nature of the radiations it emits and the other by a particular spectrum, seem likewise to exist in pitchblende.
The sovereign can only be considered collectively and as a body; but each person, in his quality as subject, is considered as an individual unit; thus the sovereign is to the subject as ten thousand is to one; in other words, each member of the state has for his share only the ten-thousandth part of the sovereign authority, though he is submitted to it in all his own entirety.
This fault, if I am right, is in a ten-thousandth worse degree to be found in Sterne, and in many novelists and modern poets, who continually put a sign-post up to show where you are to feel. They set out with assuming their readers to be stupid, very different from "Robinson Crusoe," the "Vicar of Wakefield," "Roderick Random," and other beautiful, bare narratives.
One letter in ten thousand, say, is mailed without direction. Our historian of civilization infers hence that each individual is totally subject to a social fate. My inference is, that, on the average, each individual is one ten-thousandth part subject to a fate in his private constitution. There is the difference, and it does not seem to me insignificant.
Under these circumstances, it follows that even with reference to that kind of imperfect information which we can possess, it is only of about the ten-thousandth part of the accessible parts of the earth that has been examined properly.
To have the ten-thousandth part of a voice in selecting among the varying policies of sundry ambitious gentlemen, all of whom have been foisted on me by committees, and of whom the successful one whose professed views may be quite antithetical to mine and can at best only roughly represent them will have, when he is not absent or manoeuvred into silence, the six-hundred-and-seventieth part of a voice in accepting or rejecting the ideas of half a dozen very ambitious gentlemen, whose measures are themselves liable to be quashed at the eleventh hour by an Upper House that sits without my will or consent, and which is in its turn legally liable to be superseded by the Sovereign, whose government is all the while being really carried on in silence by permanent officials whose very names I do not know and who have no connection with me beyond accepting, in ignorance of my existence, my dole towards their salaries, this is not a form of democracy that appeals very attractively to me as an individual member of Demos.
That I encountered danger and trod the most perilous places, without thinking of or sparing myself, was because I had a definite aim, and thought of nothing but to do my best in my simplicity and straightforwardness. Thus it was that I exposed my life where death seemed inevitable, if I might accomplish but a ten-thousandth part of what I hoped."
Not the ten-thousandth portion of the anguish that was mine during the lingering detail of its execution. A frightful selfishness hurried me on, while my heart was poisoned with remorse. Think you that the groans of Clerval were music to my ears?
If it vibrated at all it would shake itself to pieces, or, failing that, send aging sound waves through all the Platform's substance. If it vibrated by the least fraction of a ten-thousandth of an inch, it would wear, and vibrate more strongly, and destroy itself and possibly the Platform. It needed the precision of an astronomical telescope's lenses multiplied! And it was bent.
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