A Tale of Two Cities

where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law;

that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain. We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement. Poor Lydgate was inwardly gro

“Brother, let me ask you one more thing: can it be that any man has the right to decide about the rest of mankind, who is worthy to live and who is more unworthy?”

Mais la violence la plus extrême, cette autre forme de barbarie, se commettait contre les esclaves, aux colonies. Tel est l’état des lieux que, plus tard, Babeuf décrira dans un mélange de lucidité et d’effroi : « Les supplices de tout genre, l’écartèlement, la torture, la roue, les bûchers, les gibets, les bourreaux multipliés partout, nous ont fa