Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion

About this book

The French Revolution overthrew one set of rulers and substituted another with different interests and different views. That is what a general election enables the people to do in England every seven years if they choose. Revolution is therefore a national institution in England; and its advocacy by an Englishman needs no apology. Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For example, every person who has mastered a profession is a sceptic oncerning it, and consequently a revolutionist. Every genuine religious person is a heretic and therefore a revolutionist. All who achieve real distinction in life begin as revolutionists. The most distinguished persons become more evolutionary as they grow older, though they are commonly supposed to become more conservative owing to their loss of faith in conventional methods of reform. Any person under the age of thirty, who, having any knowledge of the existing ocial order, is not a revolutionist, is an inferior. AND YET Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder. JOHN TANNER I ON GOOD BREEDING If there were no God, said the eighteenth century Deist, it would be necessary to invent Him. Now this XVIII century god was deus ex machina, the god who helped those who could not help themselves, the god of the lazy and incapable. The nineteenth century decided that there is ndeed no such god; and now Man must take in hand all the work that he used to shirk with an idle prayer. He must, in effect, change himself into the political Providence which he formerly conceived as god; and such change is not only ossible, but the only sort of change that is real.