In fact, have not people been going to school for centuries, only to be told that Julius Caesar founded the empire and Charlemagne reconstructed it? That Socrates as much as invented logic, and Dante created Italian literature by a stroke of his pen? It is but a very short time that the mythological conception of such people as the creators of history has been gradually displaced, and not always in precise terms, by the prosaic notion of a historical process of society. Was not the French revolution willed and made, according to various versions of literary invention, by the different saints of the liberalist legends, the saints of the right, the saints of the left, the Girondist saints, the Jacobine saints? Thus it comes that Paine has devoted quite a considerable portion of his ponderous intellect to the proof, as though he were a proofreader of history, that all those disturbances might eventually not have occurred at all. By the way, I have never been able to understand why a man with so little appreciation for the crude necessity of facts should have called himself a positivist. It was the good fortune of most of your saints in France which enabled them alternately to honor one another and to crown one another in due time with their deserved diadem of thorns. For this reason the rules of classic tragedy remained gloriously in force for them. If it were not so, who knows how many imitators of Saint Juste (a truly great man) would have ended through the hands of the henchmen of the scoundrel Fouché, and how many accomplices of Danton (a great man who missed his place) would have donned the felon's garb at Cambaceres, while others might have been content to pit themselves against the adventurous Drouet, or that pitiful actor Tellien, for the modest stripes of a petty prefect.