Our clocks strike when there is a change from hour to hour; but no hammer in the horologe of Time peals through the Universe when there is a change from Era to Era. Men understand not what is among them; as calmness is the characteristic of strength, so the weightiest cause may be the most silent.-CARLYLE. UNIV. OF THE CITADEL OF FREEDOM A CHAPTER I "WHO GOES THERE?" RAGGED stripling, gaunt with hunger and weary from long tramping, drops down beside the road on a spring day and falls asleep in the sunshine. He dreams that the human race has gone back centuries and that somehow in so doing it has arrived at a golden age in which men are neither driven by greed nor restrained by authority. Everything is Eden-like. The small amount of governing that is required is attended to by all of the population, which he sees as peasants, assembled under the trees and determining policies which somehow or other execute themselves. Finally Jean Jacques Rousseau awoke, but not to the realities of life, for it was his contribution and his curse that he never saw things as they really were or as they could ever be permanently established. He did, however, contribute to his age and to succeeding ages a spirit of adventure and of romance in government which still quickens the thought of millions of people. That youthful dream of his, taking form long afterwards in his Social Contract, was indeed epoch-making. He, more perhaps than any one person, is to be credited with giving the chief impetus to the French Revolution and to the long chain of political repercussions which it started. Those repercussions still fire men's imaginations and set them out to destroy not only that which is intolerable in governmental systems, but to destroy the whole fabric of government everywhere and to set up in its place a reign of rainbows and soft music and of far-off fairy-days. Had he come a little earlier, he would have been laughed out of a hearing. Had he come much later, he would have been ignored, for some other would have supplied the catch-phrases for that particular form of reaction which the oppression of the dying French monarchy made inevitable. |