586 INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTIONS. 



current creed, is insisted on by military rule ; so that an offi 

 cer who declines is expelled the army nay, worse, one who 

 in a court of justice is proved to have been falsely charged is 

 bound to challenge those who charged him. Yet in a 

 country where the spirit of revenge is supreme over religion, 

 law, and equity, it is expected not only that men will 

 at once cease to sacrifice others in satisfaction of their 

 &quot; honour,&quot; but will at once be ready to sacrifice their own 

 interests to further the interests of their fellows ! 



Then in France, if the sentiment of private revenge, 

 though dominant, is shown in ways less extreme, the senti 

 ment of national revenge is a political passion. Enormous 

 military burdens are borne in the hope of wiping out &quot; dis 

 honour &quot; in blood. Meanwhile the Kepublic has brought 

 little purification of the Empire. Within a short time we 

 have had official corruption displayed in the selling of deco 

 rations; there have been the Panama scandals, implicating 

 various political personages men of means pushing their 

 projects at the cost of thousands impoverished or ruined; 

 and, more recently still, have come the blackmailing revela 

 tions the persecuting of people, even to the death, to obtain 

 money by threatened disclosures or false charges. Never 

 theless, while among the select men chosen by the nation to 

 rule there is so much delinquency, and while the specially 

 cultured who conduct the public journals act in these fla 

 gitious ways, it is supposed that the nation as a whole will, 

 by reorganization, be immediately changed in character, 

 and a maleficent selfishness transformed into a beneficent 

 unselfishness ! 



It would not be altogether irrational to expect that 

 some of the peaceful Indian hill-tribes, who display the 

 virtue of forgiveness without professing it, or those Papuan 

 Islanders among whom the man chosen as chief uses his pro 

 perty to help poorer men out of their difficulties, might live 

 harmoniously under socialistic arrangements; but can we 

 reasonably expect this of men who, pretending to believe 



