human
Its hard, dry kernel consists of the abstract idea of equality. --[The French Revolution. By H. A. Taine. Vol. i., bk. ii., chap. ii., sec. iii. Translation. New York: Henry Holt & Co.]--Taine's French Revolution is cynical, and, with all its accumulation of material, omits some facts necessary to a philosophical history; but a passage following that quoted is worth reproducing in this connection:
gpt
The treatment of the nobles of the Assembly is the same as the treatment of the Protestants by Louis XIV. . . . One hundred thousand Frenchmen driven out at the end of the seventeenth century, and one hundred thousand driven out at the end of the eighteenth! Mark how an intolerant democracy completes the work of an intolerant monarchy! The moral aristocracy was mowed down in the name of uniformity; the social aristocracy is mowed down in the name of equality. For the second time an abstract principle, and with the same effect, buries its blade in the heart of a living society.