Indeed, the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments than
churches, where the feelings of humanity are thus outraged. Poets
who have to deal with an audience not yet graduated in the school of
the rights of men and who must apply themselves to the moral
constitution of the heart would not dare to produce such a triumph
as a matter of exultation. There, where men follow their natural
impulses, they would not bear the odious maxims of a Machiavellian
policy, whether applied to the attainments of monarchical or
democratic tyranny. They would reject them on the modern as they
once did on the ancient stage, where they could not bear even the
hypothetical proposition of such wickedness in the mouth of a
personated tyrant, though suitable to the character he sustained. No
theatric audience in Athens would bear what has been borne in the
midst of the real tragedy of this triumphal day: a principal actor
weighing, as it were, in scales hung in a shop of horrors, so much
actual crime against so much contingent advantage; and after putting
in and out weights, declaring that the balance was on the side of
the advantages. They would not bear to see the crimes of new democracy
posted as in a ledger against the crimes of old despotism, and the
book-keepers of politics finding democracy still in debt, but by no
means unable or unwilling to pay the balance.
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