Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Crowned Masterpieces of Eloquence, Representing the Advance of Civilization, as Collected in the World's Best Orations, From the Earliest Period to the Present Time, Vol. 5
If the story were an allegory as it seems to be, it would come nearer than any biography of Danton can come to suggesting the secret of his success and of his overthrow. He was at once devoted and desperate. Threatened with everlasting infamy, he considered what it would mean, and took the risk. He saw certain death before him, and went forward to meet it, shrinking less from it for himself than he had done in in?icting it on others. It is doubtful if such a man could be created except through the very forces he so fiercely antagonized. The impulse of tyranny, of mastering men so as to compel them at their peril to accept the will Of another, is shown in the life of Danton as it was in that of the other Attilas who are recognized by the generations after them as Scourges of God. But neither an Attila nor a Danton could exist in a normal society. It is only when a civilization is effete that the strongest men become at once disorganizers and reorganizers. It is part of the theory of Pasteur that as soon as life leaves matter the same invisible organ isms which operated to keep it alive begin to disintegrate it, that it may be reorganized into other, and in the sum Of things into higher forms of life. We cannot study the life and work Of such menacing and Titanic figures as Danton without seeing that in its economies and the conservation Of its energies, nature is a unit, true to itself in what is greatest as in what is least.
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