French Revolution (1919)

Astrologers tell us that the history of the world moves in cycles; that from time to time the same forces arise producing eras that strangely resemble one another. Between these eras a close affinity exists, and so it is that we, in looking back to the past from the world crisis of today, realize that periods which in times of peace have soothed or thrilled us have now lost their meaning, that the principles which inspired them have no place in our philosophy. The Renaissance is dead; the Reformation is dead; even the great wars of bygone days seem dwarfed by the immensity of the recent conflict. But whilst the roar of battle dies down another sound is heard-the angry murmur that arose in 1789 and that, though momentarily hushed, has never lost its force. Once more we are in the cycle of revolution. The French Revolution is no dead event; in turning over the contemporary records of those tremendous days we feel that we are touching live things; from the yellowed pages voices call to us, voices that still vibrate with the passions that stirred them more than a century ago-here the desperate appeal for liberty and justice, there the trumpet - call of " King and Country "; now the story told with tears of death faced gloriously, now a maddened scream of rage against a fellow-man. When in all the history of the world until the present day has human nature shown itself so terrible and so sublime? And is not the fascination that amazing epoch has ever since exercised over the minds of men owing to the fact that the problems it held are still unsolved, that the same movements which originated with it are still at work amongst us? " What we learn to-day from the study of the Great Revolution," the anarchist Prince Kropotkin wrote in 1908, " is that it was the source and origin of all the present communist, anarchist, and socialist conceptions."