书城公版The Origins of Contemporary France
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第670章

[15] Here Taine is seeing mankind as being male, strong and hardy;however I feel that liberty is more desirable for the strong and confident while the child, the lost, the sick, the ignorant or feeble person is looking for protection, reassurance and guidance. When society consisted of strong independent farmers, hunters, warriors, nomads or artisans backed by family and clan, liberty was an important idea. Today few if any can rise above the horde and gain the insights, the wisdom and the competence which once was such a common thing. Today the strong seek promotion inside the hierarchy of the welfare state rest-house. (S.R.)[16] This is just what Lenin could not believe when he read this around 1906. Even Taine did not see how much a French government organization depended upon staff recruited from a hardworking, modest and honest French population. We have now lived to see how the nationalization of private property in Egypt, Argentina, Algeria not to speak of Ethiopia and India proved disastrous and how 40 years of government ownership should degrade and corrupt the populations of Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Albania etc. (SR).

[17] When the function to be performed is of an uncertain or mixed character the following rule may be applied in deciding whether the State or individuals shall be entrusted with it; also in determining, in the case of cooperation, what portion of it shall be assigned to individuals and what portion to the State. As a general rule, when individuals, either singly or associated together, have a direct interest in, or are drawn toward, a special function, and the community has no direct interest therein, the matter belongs to individuals and not to the State. On the other hand, if the interest of the community in any function is direct, and indirect for individuals singly or associated together, it is proper for the State and not for individuals to take hold of it. - According to this rule the limits of the public and private domain can be defined, which limits, as they change backward and forward, may be verified according to the changes which take place in interests and preferences, direct or indirect.

[18] Carlyle: "Cromwell's Speeches and Letters," III., 418.

(Cromwell's address to the Parliament, September 17, 1656.)[19] Seeley, "Life and Times of Stein," II., 143. - Macaulay, "Biographical essays," Frederick the Great. 33, 35, 87, 92.

[20] Eugene Schuyler, "Peter the Great," vol. 2.

[21] Cf. "The Revolution" vol. II., pp. 46 and 323, vol. III., ch I. Archives des Affaires Etrangèrés. Vol. 332. (Letter by Thiberge, Marseilles, Brumaire 14, year II.) "I have been to Marteygne, a small town ten leagues from Marseilles, along with my colleague Fournet; I found (je trouvée) seventeen patriots in a town of give thousand population." - Ibid., (Letter by Regulus Leclerc, Bergues, Brumaire 15, year II.) At Bergues, he says, "the municipality is composed of traders with empty stores and brewers without beer since the law of the maximum." Consequently there is universal lukewarmness, "only forty persons being found to form a popular club, holding sessions as a favor every five days. . . . Public spirit at Bergues is dead; fanaticism rules." - Archives Nationales, F7, 7164(Department of Var, reports of year V. "General idea.") - "At Draguignan, out of seven thousand souls, forty patriots, exclusifs, despised or dishonest; at Vidauban, nine or ten exclusifs, favored by the municipality and who live freely without their means being known;at Brignolles, frequent robberies on the road by robbers said to have been very patriotic in the beginning of the Revolution: people are afraid of them and dare not name them; at Fréjus, nine leading exclusifs who pass all their time in the cafe." - Berryat-Saint-Prix, "La Justice Révolutionnaire," p. 146. - Brutus Thierry, grocer, member of the Rev. Com. Of Angers, said that "in angers, there were not sixty revolutionaries."[22] Macaulay. "History of England," I., 152. "The Royalists themselves confessed that, in every department of honest industry, the discarded warriors prospered beyond other men, that none was charged with any theft or robbery, that none was heard to ask an alms, and that, if a baker, a mason, or a waggoner attracted notice by his diligence and sobriety, he was in all probability one of Oliver's old soldiers."