Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 393, July 1848

CHAPTER XIII

I am apt – judging egotistically, perhaps, from my own experience – to measure a young man's chances of what is termed practical success in life, by what may seem at first two very vulgar qualities; viz., his inquisitiveness and his animal vivacity. A curiosity which springs forward to examine every thing new to his information – a nervous activity, approaching to restlessness, which rarely allows bodily fatigue to interfere with some object in view – constitute, in my mind, very profitable stock in hand to begin the world with.

Tired as I was, after I had performed my ablutions, and refreshed myself in the little coffee-room of the inn at which I put up, with the pedestrian's best beverage, familiar and oft-calumniated tea, I could not resist the temptation of the broad bustling street, which, lighted with gas, shone on me through the dim windows of the coffee-room. I had never before seen a large town, and the contrast of lamp-lit, busy night in the streets, with sober, deserted night in the lanes and fields, struck me forcibly.

I sauntered out, therefore, jostling and jostled, now gazing at the windows, now hurried along the tide of life, till I found myself before a cook' shop, round which clustered a small knot of housewives, citizens, and hungry-looking children. While contemplating this group, and marvelling how it comes to pass that the staple business of earth's majority is how, when, and where to eat, my ear was struck with "'In Troy there lies the scene,' as the illustrious Will remarks."

Looking round, I perceived Mr Peacock pointing his stick towards an open doorway next to the cook's shop, the hall beyond which was lighted with gas, while, painted in black letters on a pane of glass over the door, was the word "Billiards."

Suiting the action to the word, the speaker plunged at once into the aperture and vanished. The boy-copanion was following more slowly, when his eye caught mine. A slight blush came over his dark cheek; he stopped, and leaning against the door-jambs, gazed on me hard and long before he said – "Well met again, sir! You find it hard to amuse yourself in this dull place; the nights are long out of London."

"Oh," said I, ingenuously, "every thing here amuses me; the lights, the shops, the crowd; but, then, to me every thing is new."

The youth came from his lounging-place and moved on, as if inviting me to walk; while he answered, rather with bitter sullenness, than the melancholy his words expressed —

"One thing, at least, cannot be new to you; it is an old truth with us before we leave the nursery – 'Whatever is worth having must be bought; ergo, he who cannot buy, has nothing worth having.'"

"I don't think," said I, wisely, "that the things best worth having can be bought at all. You see that poor dropsical jeweller standing before his shop-door, – his shop is the finest in the street, – and I dare say he would be very glad to give it to you or me in return for our good health and strong legs. Oh no! I think with my father – 'All that are worth having are given to all; – that is, nature and labour.'"

"Your father says that; and you go by what your father says! Of course, all fathers have preached that, and many other good doctrines, since Adam preached to Cain; but I don't see that the fathers have found their sons very credulous listeners."

"So much the worse for the sons," said I bluntly.

"Nature," continued my new acquaintance, without attending to my ejaculation – "nature indeed does give us much, and nature also orders each of us how to use her gifts. If nature gave you the propensity to drudge, you will drudge; if she gives me the ambition to rise, and the contempt for work, I may rise – but I certainly shall not work."

"Oh," said I, "you agree with Squills, I suppose, and fancy we are all guided by the bumps on our foreheads?"

"And the blood in our veins, and our mother's milk. We inherit other things besides gout and consumption. So you always do as your father tells you! Good boy!"

I was piqued. Why we should be ashamed of being taunted for goodness, I never could understand; but certainly I felt humbled. However I answered sturdily – "If you had as good a father as I have, you would not think it so very extraordinary to do as he tells you."

"Ah! so he is a very good father, is he! He must have a great trust in your sobriety and steadiness to let you wander about the world as he does."

"I am going to join him in London."

"In London! Oh, does he live there?"

"He is going to live there for some time."

"Then, perhaps, we may meet. I, too, am going to town."

"Oh, we shall be sure to meet there!" said I, with frank gladness; for my interest in the young man was not diminished by his conversation, however much I disliked the sentiments it expressed.

The lad laughed, and his laugh was peculiar. It was low, musical, but hollow and artificial.

"Sure to meet! London is a large place: where shall you be found?"

I gave him, without scruple, the address of the hotel at which I expected to find my father; although his deliberate inspection of my knapsack must already have apprised him of that address. He listened attentively, and repeated it twice over, as if to impress it on his memory; and we both walked on in silence, till, turning up a small passage, we suddenly found ourselves in a large churchyard, – a flagged path stretched diagonally across it towards the market-place, on which it bordered. In this churchyard, upon a grave-stone, sat a young Savoyard; his hurdy-gurdy, or whatever else his instrument might be called, was on his lap; and he was gnawing his crust, and feeding some poor little white mice (standing on their hind-legs on the hurdy-gurdy) as merrily as if he had chosen the gayest resting-place in the world.

We both stopped. The Savoyard, seeing us, put his arch head on one side, showed all his white teeth in that happy smile so peculiar to his race, and in which poverty seems to beg so blithely, and gave the handle of his instrument a turn.

"Poor child!" said I.

"Aha, you pity him! but why? According to your rule, Mr Caxton, he is not so much to be pitied; the dropsical jeweller would give him as much for his limbs and health as for ours! How is it – answer me, son of so wise a father – that no one pities the dropsical jeweller, and all pity the healthy Savoyard? It is, sir, because there is a stern truth which is stronger than all Spartan lessons – Poverty is the master-ill of the world. Look round. Does poverty leave its signs over the graves? Look at that large tomb fenced round; read that long inscription: – 'virtues' – 'best of husbands' – 'affectionate father' – 'inconsolable grief' – 'sleeps in the joyful hope,' &c., &c. Do you suppose these stoneless mounds hide no dust of what were men just as good? But no epitaph tells their virtues; bespeaks their wives' grief; or promises joyful hope to them!"

"Does it matter? Does God care for the epitaph and tombstone?"

"Date qualche cosa!" said the Savoyard, in his touching patois, still smiling, and holding out his little hand.

Therein I dropped a small coin. The boy evinced his gratitude by a new turn of the hurdy-gurdy.

"That is not labour," said my companion; "and had you found him at work, you had given him nothing. I too have my instrument to play upon and my mice to see after. Adieu!"

He waved his hand, and strode irreverently over the graves back in the direction we had come.

I stood before the fine tomb with its fine epitaph; the Savoyard looked at me wistfully.

CHAPTER XIV

The Savoyard looked at me wistfully. I wished to enter into conversation with him. That was not easy. However, I began: —

Pisistratus. – "You must be often hungry enough, my poor boy. Do the mice feed you?"

Savoyard puts his head on one side, shakes it, and stroked his mice.

Pisistratus. – "You are very fond of the mice; they are your only friends, I fear."

Savoyard, evidently understanding Pisistratus, rubs his face gently against the mice, then puts them softly down on a grave, and gives a turn to the hurdy-gurdy. The mice play unconcernedly over the grave.

Pisistratus, pointing first to the beasts, then to the instrument. – "Which do you like best, the mice or the hurdy-gurdy?"

Savoyard shows his teeth – considers – stretches himself on the grass – plays with the mice – and answers volubly.

Pisistratus, by the help of Latin comprehending that the Savoyard says, that the mice are alive and the hurdy-gurdy is not – "Yes, a live friend is better than a dead one. Mortua est hurda-gurda!"

Savoyard shakes his head vehemently. – "Nô – nô! Eccellenza, non ê mortu!" and strikes up a lively air on the slandered instrument. The Savoyard's face brightens – he looks happy: the mice run from the grave into his bosom.

Pisistratus, affected. – "Have you a father – An vivat pater?"

Savoyard, with his face overcast. – "Nô – eccellenza!" then pausing a little, he says briskly, "Si-Si!" and plays a solemn air on the hurdy-gurdy – stops – rests one hand on the instrument, and raises the other to heaven.

Pisistratus understands. – "The father is like the hurdy-gurdy, at once dead and living. The mere form is a dead thing, but the music lives." Pisistratus drops another small piece of silver on the ground, and turns away.

"God help and God bless thee, Savoyard. Thou hast done Pisistratus all the good in the world. Thou hast corrected the hard wisdom of the young gentleman in the velveteen jacket; Pisistratus is a better lad for having stopped to listen to thee."

I regained the entrance to the churchyard – I looked back – there sate the Savoyard, still amidst men's graves, but under God's sky. He was still looking at me wistfully, and when he caught my eye, he pressed his hand to his heart, and smiled. "God help and God bless thee, young Savoyard."

REPUBLICAN FRANCE

JUNE 1848

How far is the application to France, of the epithet employed in the title that heads these pages, a misnomer? This is a question that would be answered very differently by those who study its state of feeling, and those who judge its position by mere established fact. That the fact and the feeling are completely at issue throughout the country, is undoubted, indisputable. A republican government has been established by the coup de main of a small minority in France – has been accepted by the hesitation of surprise – has been maintained by the desire of peace and order: – so far goes fact. Republican principles were hateful to the immense majority of the country at large in the past, uncongenial to its habits and sentiments, impossible according to its views; they are productive, as yet, of nothing but confusion, distress, ruin, riot, and mistrust, in the present; they are looked upon with alarm as regards their results in the future: – so much for feeling. Fact and feeling, then, are at variance and in collision. The result of the conflict lies hidden in the mysteries of that future, the issue of which, at no epoch of history, perhaps, clearseeing eyes and wise foreseeing heads could less pretend to predict, than in the present chaotic hurly-burly of European society. The politicians who declared that the general spirit of the country in France was, in their vague and fantastic language of the Chamber, centre-gauche, or the advocate of liberal progress, may have been very right, – but republican it never was, republican it is not. Republican – without pretension to the audacity of a prediction but just stated as impossible – it certainly does not as yet appear ever likely to become.

In its present state of feeling, then, France – that is to say, the country, the provinces, the departments, or whatever France, out of Paris, may be called – is about as much genuine republican, as a white man who suddenly finds his face smeared over with the contents of a blacking-bottle is a genuine negro. But, for the sake of avoiding that confusion of terms and ideas in which the French themselves are so fond of indulging, to an extent that proves the deification of "the vague" to take far higher flights among them, especially in their republican tenets, than any flown by confused German head, – let it be taken as a rule, that fact is to have the precedence of feeling, as in most matters in the world, – and let it be supposed that the misnomer is no misnomer, that there has been no mistake, in truth, in the title of "Republican France."

Between France out of Paris and France in Paris, a great distinction, in speaking of the country, must always be drawn; although, in the matter of republicanism in the feelings of the mass, the same blacking-bottle remark might be applied to the majority of the citizens of the capital, as to the country at large. No family of grown-up daughters, who have been tyrannically kept in the nursery like children when they no longer felt themselves such, and made to wear mamma's worn-out dresses scantily cut down to their shapes, could be more sundered in feeling from their lady-mother, and jealous of her overgrown charms, her gaiety, her splendour, and her power, than the departments, – kept in the nursery upon centralisation system, and fed upon the bread-and-milk of insignificance, – are of the tyrannical supremacy, the overweening superiority, and the disdainful airs, affected to her despised progeny by Mother Paris. The pursuance of the concentrating system has thus produced an estrangement in the family, – a jealousy and spite on the one hand, a greater and increasing assumption of airs of supremacy on the other. The family ties between Paris and France are as wholly disunited as family ties can be, in the necessities of a more or less intimate connexion: the mother has isolated, in her despotism, herself from her children, the children have imbibed distrust and envy of the mother. The consequence is, that there are two distinct families in feeling, – there are two Frances; there is the France of Paris, of Paris that asserts its right to be all France, and the France of the departments, that, in spite of the assertions of Paris, desire to put in their little claim for a small share in the name, and would like to have their own little fingers in the pies of revolutions, and changes of government in the family, that mamma cooks up. True, they are supposed to eat at the same table, but mamma has all the tit-bits. They have a voice in the family council, but it is when mamma has already issued her dictum, and declared that such and such things shall be as she has decided it. They help to support the family establishment with the moneys which mamma declares they must contribute out of their heritage; but then mamma, they declare, spends a most undue proportion upon herself, in dressing herself out with finery, keeping up an unnecessary state, and throwing away the sums confided to her to overpay a throng of unruly onhangers, with all the prodigality of fear; while they, the poor daughters, are made to put up with cast-off finery, and to be thwarted and twitted by harsh governesses, and to fight, as best they may, with an obstreperous herd of unpaid pensioners, which mamma's mismanagement has excited to uproar; and then, after all, to kiss hands and thank mamma for whatever they can get, – scanty sugar-plums and many cuffs. Is this to be endured? The children grumble much, and particularly since mamma has chosen to make changes in the direction of the household establishment of which they by no means approve, and has only produced confusion and disorder in it. But at present they can do no more than grumble; mamma has the rod, and they know that she will use it; mamma has the supreme influence, and habit makes them think they must abide by it. There is no doubt, at the same time, that the children and parent would unite in a common bond of union were the family honour to be asserted against an attack from any adversary to the family out of the house. Their intestine jealousies would be forgotten for the time, for the maintenance of the common good – a fancied good; for, after all, mother and daughters have the same blood, the same temperr and character, the same vain-glory, conceit, and irritability, the same strong prejudices of ignorance; and they would join hands and clamour together in the same opposition to the stranger. But this common-cause making, upon occasions of extraordinary pressure from without, detracts nothing, at other times, from the mistrust, jealousy, and angry susceptibility of the children in internal affairs. In moments of family crisis, will matters always go on as heretofore?

Nurseries will be obstreperous sometimes, and children will revolt, and mammas may pass very uncomfortable moments in the face of angry daughters in rebellion. Will the children take upon themselves, at last, to protest against mamma's disdainful commands, and assert a will of their own, and a right to think for themselves? This question is one upon the solution of which depends the fate of France, as well as upon the many thousand chances which the capricious and ever-shifting gales of a revolutionary atmosphere may, at any moment, suddenly blow, like a spark into a powder barrel, shattering the face of the past, and changing the direction of the future. Twice already, since the revolution of February, has the question been nearly answered in the affirmative. The last instance, of which more anon, may be taken as a striking proof that the children may possibly not always submit to the dictates of the mother, – that family mistrust may break out into family quarrel, and family quarrel in nations is civil war. Who again, however, may venture to predict what shall be the destinies of Republican France, – what web of darkness or of light, of blood-streaked stuff or of gold-threaded tissue, it may be weaving with its agitated and troubled hands, or what force it may interpose to tear the work to shreds before it be even yet completed? Most may fear, none may say. But prediction, upon whatever cunning foresight it may be based, must always call a sort of feeling of inspiration, nearly allied to superstition, to its aid: and thus the fanciful mind may, without taking upon itself the airs of a Pythoness, give way to a little superstition, and yet, perhaps, be not too strongly condemned of folly. There exists an old prophecy in France, emanating from a monk of the middle ages, the authenticity of which cannot be doubted, or, at all events, cannot be disputed, in as far as it was in well-known existence at the commencement of this century. It predicts, in mystic language, – dark, it is true, but wonderfully clear after its verification, – all the many revolutionary changes that have taken place in France, and now once more proclaims the reign of the "sons of Brutus." "Armed men," it distinctly says, "will march upon the doomed city," "sword and fire will prevail against it," "the wolves will devour each other." May the seeming superstition of a fantastical question be pardoned! May not these words refer to the future outbreak of the provinces of France against the capital? If they do, in what sense, with what tendencies, to forward the views of what party, may it be? Be that as it may, however, it is not the obscure future that is dealt with here, but the present confused and uncertain state of Republican France.

As it may be inferred from what has been said, Paris, then, has put on its crown, as capital, to some purpose. Never did despot assert his right to dictate his autocratic will to serfs and slaves more authoritatively than does revolutionary and republican Paris to the provinces of France. No three-tailed Bashaw of old melodrams could be more imperative in his ordinances, more arrogant in the conviction of the indisputability of his will. The bare supposition that the provinces could have a will of their own would strike Paris dumb with astonishment. Paris has been accustomed to consider itself not only as the heart, but the head, and the arms and legs to boot, of the whole country. The inert body has no more, in its consideration, to do, than allow itself to be fed with what scanty morsels of bounty and importance Paris may choose to afford, and then not to dare to grumble afterwards if the food prove unsavoury to its tastes, or indigestible to its susceptibilities. Paris is "Sir Oracle," and, when it speaks, no provincial "dog dare bark." Paris, thus, is the great type of the mainspring of the national character, – which works sometimes, we allow, for good as well as for evil: – namely, of that mixture of vanity and overweening conceit, which may be found at the bottom of almost every action of the French. It calls itself "the great capital of the civilised world;" and thus considers that, although the departments may be admitted to the reflected rays of lustre that emanate from its superior glory, they must look upon themselves as mere satellites, created to revolve at its liking and its high will, and perform their revolutions in whatever direction it deems fit to make its own revolution. Let it not be supposed that this representation is exaggerated, or that it proceeds from the distorted views of a foreigner. Hear the Parisian himself speak; list to his expressions of contempt for those unknown and barbarous regions called departments; mark how he asserts the unutterable superiority of his Parisian essence; see how he tosses his head and curls his lip with an infinitely aristocratic air, when he condescends to notice them with a word; and never was Paris more eager in the maintenance of its tyrannical supremacy; never was it more despotically and autocratically disposed; never more aristocratic, to use the pet phrase of the day, than under the rule of soi-disant liberty, and of liberty of opinion, above all other liberties proclaimed by the French republic.

What were the expressions of the first republican minister of the interior, that type of republican exclusiveness and despotism, in his famous and rather too famous bulletins de la republique, issued to all France as the language and opinions of the government of the day? Paris, they informed the world, was the heart of France, from which all life and living principle emanated, through which every drop of the country's blood must flow, in order that it might beat in unison, and be refreshed with true republican vitality. Paris, they said again, was the hand that had created and fashioned the republic, and that was to direct its steps, lead it vigorously forward in its way – as it was the head that conceived, it was the hand that executed: it was more than all this, it was the soul of France – the pure and true essence emanating from the new deity, the republic. Paris, they asserted in as many direct words, was the mistress whose will was to be obeyed. It is unnecessary to point out how little such declarations were in accordance with republican principles, what little affinity they had with the three great watchwords of the day, "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity." Republicanism in France, according to those old traditions, to which those who call themselves the only true and pure republicans seem always to be looking back as the only true and pure models for their admiration and imitation, was always based upon despotism, supported by constraint, compulsion, violence, and even terrorism; and the first efforts of modern republicanism were evidently exerted to place their old, newfangled, statue of bastard liberty upon the same heterogeneous pedestal. The instructions of the same Bashaw-minister to the emissaries whom he despatched as Bashaws of lesser and fewer tails into the provinces, to see that they were duly disposed to fall down and worship the Goddess Republic, that had been set up, were modelled after the same and still rougher fashion.

The missionaries were invested with autocratic powers to make and unmake according to their own autocratic will; to send away functionaries who might appear lukewarm in the cause; to put in their places such acolytes as might better serve the altars of the goddess, and to offer up sacrifices to her, civil and military, judicial and political, as they might think pleasing to the divinity, or convenient and agreeable to their own hates and prejudices. They were particularly requested to travailler the country, to torture it, as the French phrase goes; and were taught, if they could not hammer the hard and unbending metal of departmental feeling to the shape they fancied, just gently to make the iron red-hot with the fire of terrorism, and then twist it to the suitable form. How well the workmen, in many instances, performed the task – how well they employed the fiery passions of the mob to produce the desired red-hot effect, and then strike – is a matter of historical fact.

In the elections for the National Assembly, the same dogmas of republican religion were strenuously enforced. No emissaries of the Inquisition ever used more moral violence to propagate a faith among suspected schismatics, than did these ministers of republican despotism to enforce the full, entire, and uttermost doctrines of their creed, even to the minutest articles. Where the moral influence appeared unlikely to penetrate as deeply into men's hearts as was desired, other and more direct methods were adopted to make entire converts; and, when these methods were found too mild to work the intended effect, and purge the land of moderatism and anti-whole-hog-ism, another stronger and more racking dose was administered: the mob was excited to overawe with threat and terrorism, and, where it could not prevent, to destroy. How should the departments dare to have a will of their own? The rebellious children were to be whipped like schoolboys into learning their lessons of pure and undefiled republicanism, and reciting them as Master Commissioner taught them; there was no better rod in pickle for such naughty urchins than the scourge of the fury of a mob, carefully taught another lesson, and one it was not slow of learning – namely, that it was master, and must constrain obedience to its will; while, in fact, itself obeyed the influence, and was the instrument of the master-spirit that ruled up above, and made the best, or rather the worst use of its rule. That all these measures failed in a great measure – those of violence as well as those of moral constraint – is attributable to a variety of complicated reasons, connected with the present state of the departments; and the how and why they failed, will be the subject of a few considerations presently.

What, again, were the expressions of the more violent and so-called only true republican party in the capital, proceeding from its organs, the clubs, upon the same occasion of the elections? To all the candidates who presented themselves before them, the same question was propounded. If, when the votes of all France were taken, it should be found that the departments declared themselves averse to the establishment of a republic, what would be the duty they would have to perform, – what steps would they take? Those who did not declare that they would turn against that National Assembly, of which they themselves might then be members, and take up arms to march upon it, were denounced as traitors to their country, unworthy of the votes of true men, and hooted from the tribune, in which they had dared to stand forward as future representatives of the people. It would have been in vain to insinuate to these good gentlemen, that, in the application of the principle of universal suffrage, in which every man was not only an elector, but eligible as representative, the voice of the majority would be the voice of all France; and that it was for all France, by the voice of its majority, to decide upon the form of government best suited to all France. In vain, indeed. The ready answer would invariably have been – that Paris was the mistress of France, and had a right to dictate its will; that Paris had made the revolution, and that, consequently, Paris was privileged to support the principles of that revolution, and to arrogate to itself all its advantages: that the country at large, in fact, had nothing to do but to give in its approval, and be happy that its concurrence was so far demanded, and that, should it dare to have an opinion of its own, woe betide it! All this insolent bombast of the ultra party in Paris might have been spared, however; the cause of "Paris v. the Departments" was never called into the court of the country. The departments had accepted the establishment of the republic as a fait accompli: they never desired to subvert the new order of things by another convulsion, that would have plunged the country, already so miserable, into an increase of misery; but they protested in favour of a republic of peace and order, upon moderate principles; and, lo and behold, Paris itself combined with them in this desire. The disappointed party of the directing master-spirits of Paris have been none the less furious in their expressions of contempt for the openly declared will of all France. They had long kicked down their idol of universal suffrage with disdain, as soon as they had found that, in spite of all the hidden machinery they had set to work in it, the idol had not obeyed their will, or declared their oracles. Universal suffrage they pronounced a hoax: constraint, tyranny, anarchy, conspiracy, civil war, were proclaimed by them the only true elements of the only true republic. Frantic with disappointment at the result of their own manœuvres, by which they had been caught in their own toils, they seized upon the pretext of sympathy in the sorrows of another country; and, aided by the treachery of certain of their own party in authority, invaded the obnoxious Assembly, overthrew the government for an hour, and proclaimed a terrorist government of their own. Foiled again in this audacious attempt, foiled at least for the time being, they now endeavoured to patch up the shaking soil that has given way beneath their feet, and plunged their leaders into a quagmire, and to build new foundations for fresh aggressions upon the discontent of a part of the working-classes. For this purpose they have taken two newfangled tools into their hands, the one of impulsion, the other of repulsion – the one of enthusiasm, the other of alarm; and both are so vaguely fashioned, and of so unintelligible a nature, that the real fact of their existence can never be proved, although their use, their purpose, and their design, in the hands of these men, are very clear. The one of these tools is a bugbear, a phantom, a bogie, to which they endeavour to give as terrific an aspect as possible, in order to fright ignorant men over into their own ranks. This evil spirit, they declare, has an existence, although no one ever saw it, no one ever felt it, no one ever knew where it dwells. No superstitious people was ever endeavoured to be worked up into a more irrefragable belief of some mysterious demon that haunts them in dark woods and obscure places to devour them – nor, generally, with more complete success over the credulous; for fear is the most powerful agent over the minds of the masses, and more especially when the fear is of the unknown and mysterious: and certainly no demon was ever described with a more hideous or blacker face. This bogie, phantom, bugbear, is a supposed influence called "Reaction." No precise form is given to it, for that would be to deprive it of more than half its terrors. No! onme ignotum pro terribili is the policy. Nothing can be more vague or indefinite than this same monster, Reaction; it remains an Ossianic cloudlike spectre, floating no one knows whence, but bringing death and pestilence in its train. If the working-classes suffer, it is the Reaction, they are told, that is the cause of all their sufferings. If all their exactions, however exorbitant and impossible, are not conceded at once, it is because that horrible Reaction labours that their just demands should be withheld. If the most violent of their own body are not elected as the true representatives of the people, it is because that pestilential Reaction has cast a spell over the minds of all the electors. The Reaction has also, potent demon although it be, all the freaks and caprices of a lesser imp; it performs the strangest and most incomprehensible feats, – for if a discontented mass of workmen revolt unsuccessfully, and gain not their ends, it was the Reaction again that was the cause of all. The Reaction, for its own vile reactionary purposes, it was, that treacherously induced them to revolt, when they themselves were naturally inclined to be the most peaceable, contented, and the least exorbitant people on the earth. See how perfidious, Machiavelic, and Jesuitical, is this horrible monster Reaction! Pity it is that, in order to establish the fact of its real existence, it should not as yet have made itself visible to mortal eyes in any incarnate form! The Reaction is, however, no less, men are told, the enemy of the republic, the adversary of all true republican principles, labouring ever to overthrow it; above all, the enemy of the people and the people's interests, their undermining serpent, their secret assassin. It is already sapping, unseen, the foundations of the republic, and it intends to pull down the ruins of that august structure upon the heads of the people, and crush it for ever beneath them. In spite of the infinite harm worked upon the spirit of the lower classes by the establishment of the belief in this phantom, there would, perhaps, be no real danger in the effect produced by the clamours of insensate ultra journals, the preachings of agitating demagogues, and the insidious insinuations of anarchist meneurs among the crowd, did not certain members of the government itself, and some of those in authority, render themselves parties concerned to the propagation of the belief, either genuinely, from having been themselves carefully inoculated with the virus of false fear, until they have really taken the disease, or designedly, for the advancement of their own purposes – did they not, in fact, throw a sop continually to mob-lecturers, by insinuating their own conviction in the existence of "bogie" by their decrees, edicts, and proclamations, and, when they are called to put down anarchy, never obey without crying "Reaction" at the same time, and vainly giving the phantom a slap on the face. As it is – and herein lies the evil – the people are taught that the National Assembly, as it is now constituted, is the concentrated essence of the spirit of Reaction – that the representatives of the people, with but few exceptions, are the ministering imps in a visible form of the invisible demon. If a word of reason is spoken in the Assembly against the clamours of unreasonable demand – "Look ye there! reaction!" is the cry; if it prepares safe measures of repression against the open efforts of anarchy – "reaction;" if it defends its own existence against the subversive attempts of conspirators – "reaction;" if it attempts to establish the republic upon a firm and solid, but moderate basis – "reaction;" if it does any thing – "reaction;" if it does nothing – "reaction;" if it cannot perform impossible wonders for the amelioration and prosperity of the lower working-classes, – at which, however, it labours most hard, – "reaction – reaction – reaction; the reaction of aristocratic feeling – the reaction of ill will – the reaction of indifference and indolence;" thereby always meaning reaction against the true republic, and its true representatives, the lower classes. The phantom Reaction is thus used as a tool by a wild and violent party against the present order of things; against the moderate majority of the Assembly more particularly; against all things and all men not suiting its views, its schemes, its dreams, and its ambitions; and the bugbear is not ill got up to scare the credulous of the lower classes more completely into the toils of the malcontents, with the fear that reaction really may destroy that idol from which they have been taught to expect all the good gifts of "roasted larks," for which they have only to open their mouths, and "showers of gold," for which they have only to stretch forth their hands – that idol that has been lacquered over with the false gilding of delusive promises by imprudent rulers, and which the many still fancy to be all of solid gold – in a word, the Republic. The reaction, in truth, exists not, or exists not in the manner that people would be led to believe. If it exists, it is in the disgust of the more laborious and less tumultuous of the lower classes themselves, who, in their increasing misery, would be happy to accept the Lama of Thibet, or any other abstraction, with an absolute government, in the place of the false idol of their hopes, that has as yet only deluded them into greater misery – it is in the reactionary cry of the wretched, who call for "King Log," or any other senseless ruler that would bring with it peace, and order, and a hope of well-being.