Does a Nation under tyranny deserve to be despised?
People who do not feel their own servitude are by necessity incapable of conceiving any idea of political liberty. Yet the total lack of this natural idea has its source, not in the individuals themselves, but in the long established circumstances which have finally quenched in them every primitive light of natural reason. Thus humanity dictates compassion of their error and not contempt, though they are despised and despicable. It seems, then, that peoples in tyranny are much more to be pitied than hated or despised, because innocently and through ignorance alone they are the unwitting accomplices of the crime of servitude, whose extensive and dreadful penalties they are enduring. But hatred and scorn, and any other more contemptuous and ferocious emotion that can be felt must indeed be directed by all thinking beings against that little class of men who though they are by no means stupid or incompetent, and are well aware that they live as slaves in a tyranny, yet shamelessly every d
