[[72]]
It is interesting to note that the developing bourgeoisie of the seventeenth century found
itself in relation to the monarchy in the same state of intellectual inferiority as that in which
to-day are the democratic masses in relation to their leaders, and for very similar reasons. The
ingenious Louis XIV expressed the point in the following words: In Franche Comté, “all
authority is found, then, in the hands of Parliament which, like an assembly of simple
bourgeois, would be easy either to fool or to frighten.” (Trans. from Dreyss, op. cit., vol. ii,
p. 328).
[[73]]
Condorcet, Progrès de I'Esprit humain, ed. de la Bib. Nat., p. 186.
[[74]]
Adolphe Thiers, Histoire de la Révolution Française, Brockhaus, Leipzig, 1846, vol. ii,
p. 141. The same spirit of illogical amalgamation of unlimited popular sovereignty with the
most rigid and despotic tutelage exercised over this alleged sovereign by its leaders,
dominates most of the speeches of the Jacobins. (Cf., for example, Œuvres de Danton,
recueilliés et annotées par A. Vermorel, Cournol, Paris, pp. 119 et seq.)
[[75]]
James Ramsay Macdonald, Socialism and Society, Independent Labour Party, London,
1905, pp. xvi, xvii.
[[76]]
Ernest Belfort Bax, Essays in Socialism New and Old, Grant Richards, London, 1906. pp. 174, 182.
