of violence. It has the serpent's charm to fix the eye upon its object. Militant English women drop their pruderies, attack persons and property. The nation gasps, but sits up and pays attention. The cause gets a hearing. To Sorel no great social uprising is possible without drama. The imagination must be shocked and fascinated. The Reformation, the Revolution of 1789, the Italian revolt against Austria, owed their successes to this spectacle of daring and uncalculating action.
It is neither important nor relevant to ask if this violence is "good" or "moral." It is justified if it is efficient; if it works toward its end in getting things done. Wherever these forces gain such headway as to shift power from one class to another, we have the essence of a "Revolution," the soul of which is religion. This religion of social insurgency is Myth, but to him that lessens neither its power nor its sanctity. It has not the slightest consequence that the myth is not "true." It is true in the sense that Napoleon's victories were won by aid of myths with which his soldiers clothed their leader.
These metaphysical rhapsodies are not from the pen of a literary trifler. They are the serious reflections of a highly trained engineer whose intellectual gifts have left their impress upon some of the best minds of our time. They are ideas, however, very awkward for all those who make charts of any society built on the ruins of the present order. The disgust which the socialist poet Morris felt for Bellamy's Utopia would be as nothing to Sorel's repulsion for the whole constructive mechanism within which Mr. Trautmann and others frame their future society.
