§ 3. EXPERIENCE.
Experience constitutes almost the only effective process by which a
truth may be solidly established in the mind of the masses, and
illusions grown too dangerous be destroyed. To this end, however, it is
necessary that the experience should take place on a very large scale,
and be very frequently repeated. The experiences undergone by one
generation are useless, as a rule, for the generation that follows,
which is the reason why historical facts, cited with a view to
demonstration, serve no purpose. Their only utility is to prove to what
an extent experiences need to be repeated from age to age to exert any
influence, or to be successful in merely shaking an erroneous opinion
when it is solidly implanted in the mind of the masses.
Our century and that which preceded it will doubtless be alluded to
by historians as an era
of curious experiments, which in no other
age have been tried in such number.
The most gigantic of these experiments was the French Revolution.
To find out that a society is not to be refashioned from top to bottom
in accordance with the dictates of pure reason, it was necessary that
several millions of men should be massacred and that Europe should be
profoundly disturbed for a period of twenty years. To prove to us
experimentally that dictators cost the nations who acclaim them dear,
two ruinous experiences have been required in fifty years, and in spite
of their clearness they do not seem to have been sufficiently
convincing. The first, nevertheless, cost three millions of men and an
invasion, the second involved a loss of territory, and carried in its
wake the necessity for permanent armies. A third was almost attempted
not long since, and will assuredly be attempted one day. To bring an
entire nation to admit that the huge German army was not, as was
currently alleged thirty years ago, a sort of harmless national
guard,
the terrible war
which cost us so dear had to take
place. To bring about the recognition that Protection ruins the nations
who adopt it, at least twenty years of disastrous experience will be
needful. These examples might be indefinitely multiplied.
[15]
[_]
The opinion of the crowd was formed in this case by those
rough-and-ready associations of dissimilar things, the mechanism of
which I have previously explained. The French national guard of that
period, being composed of peaceable shopkeepers, utterly lacking in
discipline and quite incapable of being taken seriously, whatever bore a
similar name, evoked the same conception and was considered in
consequence as harmless. The error of the crowd was shared at the time
by its leaders, as happens so often in connection with opinions dealing
with generalisations. In a speech made in the Chamber on the 31st of
December, 1867, and quoted in a book by M. E. Ollivier that has appeared
recently, a statesman who often followed the opinion of the crowd but
was never in advance of it — I allude to M. Thiers — declared that Prussia
only possessed a national guard analogous to that of France, and in
consequence without importance, in addition to a regular army about
equal to the French regular army; assertions about as accurate as the
predictions of the same statesman as to the insignificant future
reserved for railways.
