For instance: Five hundred men constitute a very good army in the midst
of a peaceful population; and this handful of soldiers exerts, indeed,
more moral power than the multitudes restrained under their government.
A smile coming from the lips of a sovereign leaves in the soul that it
penetrates a far deeper trace than all the demonstrations of a common or
vulgar crowd. The traveler, detained by the winter in the polar regions,
finds that he is warm and takes pleasure in the discovery, though at the
time the thermometer marks 10 degrees below zero.
The atmosphere of a cave that we find warm in winter seems to us,
without being modified in the least, of an icy coldness in summer.
The large quantity of alcohol that laboring people consume would ruin
the health of less strongly constituted persons.
To conclude, then, these examples prove beyond dispute that one can only
appreciate the importance of an act when he takes into account the
nature of its agents, and that without these considerations he will be
obliged to give up immediately all serious estimation of these
manifestations.
Here I touch, it seems to me, a law of harmony, a curious law that I
wish to examine incidentally. I shall, then, occupy myself with the
objections that may, perhaps, be opposed even yet to the thermometric
system of the shoulder
Episode VII.
The foregoing study has, as it seems, established an important fact,
namely, that among the various classes of men which make up society
there is no common standard of measure.
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