#electioncountdown

...every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

Friday nights were inferno-like, especially at month-end when pensions were paid and the disabled-turned-drunks spilled from the benches in the parks into the vans. On the pavement outside Marshall Square the pickup van doors clanged open and shut and roared off for another swoop. Africans were herded into the charge office to shouts of 'Kom aan, kom aan' (Come on, get a move on) and the sherry-gangsters howled and swore through the night, till the shouts turned into gravel-sounding alcoholic snores and it was time to eat the dry bread and hard-boiled egg and join the queue to court.

It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul.

Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers--in a word, better citizens.

Everyone realizes how praiseworthy it is for a prince to honour his word and to be straightforward rather than crafty in his dealings; none the less contemporary experience shows that princes who have achieved great things have been those who have given their word lightly, who have known how to trick men with their cunning, and who, in the end, have overcome those abiding by honest principles.

When Monsieur Mabeuf said to Marius, 'Of course I approve of people holding political opinions,' he had been expressing his own attitude of mind. All political opinions came alike to him and he approved of them all without seeking to distinguish between them, like the Greeks, who referred to the Eumenides as 'beautiful, good, delightful' . . . asking only that they would leave him alone. His politics were confined to his passionate love of plants and, even more, of books. Like everyone else he had a label, since at that time nobody could live without one, but his 'ism' was of a non-committed kind: he was not a royalist, a Bonapartist, a chartist, an Orleanist, or an anarchist--simply a book-ist.