' . 5 tracts under the door_..:and it has done all t•his so successfuily that to-day we behold the issue in the det€Stable fact, tha( at . the very moment when the spirit of turbulent criticism is rea,vakenin:g, men who long for freedom begin the attempt to obtain it by entreating their masters to be kind enough to pro- . teot them by.modifying th~ laws which these masters themselves have created ! But times and tempers are changed since a. hundred years ago. Rebels are everywhere to be found, who n-0longer wish to obey the law without knowing whence it comes, what a.re its uses, and whither arises the obligation to submit to it, and the reverence with which it is encompassed. The rebels of our day are criticising the very foundations of Society, which have hitherto been held sacred, an!I first and foremost amongst them that fetish, law. Just for this reason the upheaval which is at hand is no meet insurrection, it is a Jlei,olution. The critics .analyse the sources of law, and find there either a god, product of the terrors of the savage, and stupid, paltry and rnalicious as the priests who vouch for its supernntural origin, or else, bloodshed, conquest by fire and sword. They study the characteristics of law, and instead of .perpetual growth corresponding to that of the human race, they find its distinctive trait to be immobility, a tendency to crysta.llise what should be modified and developed day by day .. 'l'hey ask how law has been maii1tained, and in its service they see the atrocities of Byzantinism,. the cruelties of the Inquisition, the "tortures of the Middle Ages, living flesh torn by the lash of the executioner, cha.ins, clubs, axes, the gloomy dungeons of prisons, agony, curses and tears. In our own, days they see, as before, the axe, the cord, the rifle, the prison; on the one hand, the brutalised prisoner, reduced to the condition of a caged beast by the debasement of his whole mor.al being, and on the o't,her; the judge, stripped of every feeling which does honour to human nature, living like a visionary in a world of legal fictions, revelling in the infliction oJ imprisonment and death, without· even suspeci:fog, in the cold malignity of his madness, the abyss of degradation into which he has himself fallen before the eyes of those whom he condemns. Bit;>!iote,caGif)OBianco ·
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