the complicity of the Government with a philanthropic association which had turned into a criminal association, he hurled his avenging thunders against the protestors. Among the most comical of these protestors I pick out a political pastor of St-Etienne called L. Comte. He wrote, in the extraordinary language employed by the members of the League of the Rights of Man: "I had hoped that the [Dreyfus] affair would have definitely cured us of the moral malaria from which we suffer, and that it would have cleansed the republican conscience of the clerical virus with which it was impregnated. It has done nothing. We are more clerical than ever."[1] Accordingly this austere man remained in the League! Protestant and middle-class logic! It is always possible, you see, that the League might one of these days be able to render some small service to the deserving ministers of the Gospel.
I have insisted rather lengthily on these grotesque incidents because they seem to me to characterise very aptly the moral ideas of the people who claim to lead us. Henceforth it must be taken for granted that politico-criminal associations which work by craft have a recognised place in any democracy that has attained its maturity. P. de Rousiers believes that America will one day cure itself of the evils which result from the guilty manœuvres of its politicians. Ostrogorski, after making a long and minute inquiry into "Democracy, and the organisation of political parties," believes that he has found remedies which will enable modern states to free themselves from exploitation by political parties. These are platonic vows; no historical experience justifies the hope that a democracy can be made to work in a capitalist country, without the criminal abuses experienced everywhere nowadays. When Rousseau demanded that the democracy should not tolerate the existence in its midst of any private association, he reasoned from his knowledge of the republics
- ↑ Cahiers de la quinzaine, loc. cit. p. 13.
