of meeting of the conspirators, the resorts of vice, and the quarter of the indigent and ignorant, in order to raise and recruit the elements of a second revolutionary deluge which might devastate what the first national convulsion had spared, and demolish what the moderation of the people had established.

They succeeded but too well. The universal fermentation served their designs, for all the sound as well as corrupt elements of the population had been so disturbed and confused amid the general excitement of events, that it was easy to give them a new impulse and direct at will an extensive insurrection, guided by skilful and daring leaders, and accomplished by blind and involuntary agents. To impel this mass to the destruction of the republic, under the pretext of aiding in its accomplishment, was the hope of the terrorists.

Every nation consists of two parts; that is to say, whatever may be the equality in rights enjoyed by a people, they will always exhibit an inequality in their habits and instincts. The most virtuous man bears within his nature certain elements of vice, a certain possibility of committing crime, which he subjugates and annihilates by virtue and humanity. The human kind collectively is organised like man individually, and is but the individual multiplied by millions. Crime is an element of the human kind, and is found to be increased in a formidable proportion in every agglomeration of men; and hence the necessity for laws and public forces.

It was this vicious part of the people, ferocious in their instincts, that the terrorists appealed to on this occasion for the support of their theories; pointing out the abasement of the higher classes as a source of vengeance, disorder as a season of rule, society as a prey, spoliation as a hope, the supremacy of one class above all others as the only true democracy, confiscation and proscription as legitimate arms, a convention ruled by the demagoguism of Paris as the republic, and promising tribunes for legislators, executioners for lictors, and the revolutionary axe in the place of reason and conscience among a victorious people.

Those who took such a view of the republic were few in number, and composed for the most part of young conspirators, pallid from their vigils in secret societies, and elated by nocturnal disputations, without respect for decency, and irresponsible in the midst of associations where all was feverish excitement; poisoned from infancy by those evangelists of terror, who had deified Danton for his daring in murder, and St. Just for his coolness in immolation. They were men rendered bitter by the isolation of their thoughts, of whom some were tempted by the idea of imitating actions which they deemed great, because they were of rare occurrence; others mere parodists of the drama of the first revolution, plagiarists of the scaffold; others, again, were ambitious of securing a name in history, whatever might be the price which conscience must pay; while others, jealous of the celebrity of crime, dwelt with ardour on the immortality of Marat and Basbeuf.

It had long been seen, by the schemes and writings of these men, that their souls were filled with sinister thoughts, and that if a revolution gave scope to their perverse designs, they would hesitate at no act, and no thought, that could call forth the reprobation of the human race. They were the sophists of the axe and block, deliberately rekindling extin

guished embers of fury, with the design of justifying by-gone acts, and making victims instead of citizens.

These men could only recruit their forces from the lowest and most mephitic dregs of the population of large capitals. Crime ferments only in masses of idleness, debauchery, and the voluntary misery of vice and immorality, far from the light shed abroad by discipline and social industry.

The mass of the industrious population of Paris had, during the preceding fifty years, made immense progress in knowledge, true civilisation, and practical virtue. Equality had ennobled and industry enriched them. Contact with the different classes formerly known as the bourgeoisie had polished and softened their ideas, language, manners, and habits; the diffusion of instruction, the promotion of economy by the establishment of savings banks, the increasing numbers of books and journals, of social and religious societies, the increase of competence, which affords a greater opportunity for leisure, and leisure which favours reflection, had all tended to produce in them the happiest change, while a rational conception of the true community of interests between them and the bourgeois classes with whom they became amalgamated had also produced a community of ideas. The immense mass of information that had penetrated through all channels among the working classes of Paris, guarded them against a blind predilection for the domination of the terrorists; while the recollection of the terrors, punishments, proscriptions, confiscations, assignats, and forced loans of the first republic, rendered familiar by the general diffusion of historical knowledge among all classes of the nation, inspired horror in the poor as well as the rich. Conscience occasionally decides with more justice among the general masses than the élite of the population, for it is almost the only moral organ which they exercise. Sophistry is only for the use of the learned -nature has no knowledge of it.

Conscience and memory interposed their barriers between the people and the excesses to which the terrorists would lead them. Although half a century is more than half the span of life allotted to man, it is so short an interval in the life of nations, that 1848 actually appeared only as the morrow of 1793, and the people trembled lest the pavement of their streets should stain their feet with the blood of the first republic.

The terrorists of 1848, therefore, in their design of seizing on the control of the second republic, could only appeal to the two elements which are always to be found at seasons of convulsion in a city numbering fifteen hundred thousand inhabitants,-crime and error, both of which were at that moment at their disposal.

There were the party of the freed convicts, debased in morals, stagnating in vice, revelling in crime, ever leaving and returning to their prisons, and existing in one fatal alternation of crime and punishment; men ejected from the galleys, perverted by contact with dungeons. Then, too, there were the miserable wretches who exist in Paris on the chances of the passing hour, the snares they spread, and the infamous callings they pursue in a corrupt capital; men driven by bad repute to hide their lives amid the throng, who, having lost the regular conditions of existence by disorderly conduct, and unwilling to recover them by dint of

industry, assume an attitude of hatred and war against every form of discipline and society; men who, perverting all relations of human morality, make a profession of vice and a glory of crime; men who live in the eddying whirl of unruly licence, inflated with incessant agitation, ever feeling thirst for blood and rapture in chaos.

All these men, whom one blushes at designating by the same name as the people, constitute a mass of nearly twenty thousand vagabonds ready for every work of destruction, unnoticed in times of quiet, but emerging from the shade and swarming through the thoroughfares in moments of civil commotion-men, whom a signal from their leader, a nocturnal appeal to their accomplices, suffices to rally at a minute's notice.

They had been called forth, during the preceding three days, by the report of firing and by the downfall of a government; they formed the bands which were then setting fire to Puteaux and Neuilly, and which were devastating and pillaging the residence of the king, and of the Rothschilds, at the very moment that this family had sent an enormous voluntary subsidy to the wounded or famished workmen. It was they who sacked the Tuileries, which had with difficulty been preserved by the true combatants. The people had resolutely cast them from their bosom, and many amongst them paid the penalty of their rapacity with their lives. Indignantly repulsed by the people of the revolution, they had plunged again, disappointed, into their genial sloughs, from which agitation might at any time call them forth.

The other element, which was equally at the disposition of the terrorists, and which they might lead on by deception to the attack of a new government, consisted not, as we have already seen, of workmen who had been led away, enrolled and disciplined under different leaders of Socialist schools-for these men were at that time honestly and heroically opposed to all violence and disorder-but of those who belonged to the brutal, ignorant, and perverse party of the communists, that is to say, the destroyers, ravagers, and barbarians of society. All the theories of these men were limited to the feeling of their sufferings, and to the desire of transforming them into enjoyments by the invasion of property, industry, land, capital, and commerce, and by the distribution of their spoils, as the legitimate conquest of a starving republic over a deposed bourgeoisie, without concerning themselves with the future amendment, by legislation, of such organised ruin.

These two elements, the one criminal, the other blind, united naturally and without premeditation, under the direction of some active leaders. A similarity of thought, though from different instincts, rallied them to the same headlong desire of overthrowing, in the provisional government, the barrier which had just been erected against their excesses, or of forcing it to become the docile instrument of their tyranny. They collected a third element of number and violence from among the indigent classes of the precincts and the suburbs of Paris, who had flocked in during the evening at the sound of cannon, and assembled in countless masses by torch-light on the vast square of the Bastille, that Mount Aventine of revolutions, into which converge the great streets emerging from all the thoroughfares of Paris. Upon this square, until midnight, armed groups were kept in a state of the utmost excitement by their own numbers and oscillations and by the murmurs which issue from such

immense bodies of men, augmenting tenfold their strength, as the waves of a rising sea increase the force of the winds. These groups were not animated by any malevolent intention towards society; on the contrary, they had come down armed to defend the hearths of the citizens of Paris against the return of the troops, who, they were told, menaced the capital with the vengeance of the king.

These clubbists agitated for the postponement of the elections and the settlement of what they termed their "grievances," as they feared that the establishment of a strong regular government would of course disappoint their machinations. These grievances, of which they clamoured for the removal, were in reality property, order, riches, and high birth. They wished for a return of the old scenes of 1793, massacre, confiscations, and proscription, with community of goods to boot. Their first plot found vent on the 16th of April. It is thus described in the History of the Revolution :-(we may state first, by way of explanation, that most of the regular troops were absent from Paris, and that the government was compelled to confide the defence of the city to general Changarnier, in command of the national guard alone)

A column of about twenty-five or thirty thousand heads, led by the most furious clubbists, and by some socialist chiefs, had just issued forth by the Pont Royal and clashed with a numerous column of national guards, whom general Courtais had drawn up in battle array under the walls of the Louvre. They had not proceeded to blows, but the meeting had been a confused tumultuous one; hostile looks, cries, and gestures had been exchanged. It was as it were two armies marching upon the same line in silence, and for the purpose of mutual observation. Already the first groups of this column of the Champ de Mars, preceded by flags and men wearing red caps, began to emerge slowly from the quay upon the Place de Grève. At this moment a forest of bayonets glistened on the other side of the Seine at the extremity of the bridge of Saint Michel. This was a body of thirty or forty thousand national guards of the left bank of the river, running at full speed at the call of Lamartine and Marrast. The breadth of the bridge was not sufficient to allow them to pass freely. They rushed in a compact column into the square to the cries of "The Republic for ever!" The Government for ever!" They blocked up the quay against twenty or thirty thousand insurgents. These remained immovable, undecided, and in consternation, at the angle of the Place de Grève, being unable either to advance, retire, or receive in their rear their reinforcements from the Champ de Mars, intercepted by the legions under arms from the Champs Elysées to the extremity of the quay Lepelletier. The legions of the left bank drew up in order of battle on the square. The legions of the precincts, of Belleville, Bercy, the faubourg of the Temple, the faubourg Saint Antoine, and all the streets on the right bank, arrived at the same moment by all the quays, and all the outlets of the great arteries of Paris, at their very utmost speed, amid cries of enthusiasm. These legions inundated with torrents of bayonets all the streets and squares from the Arsenal to the Louvre. In three hours Paris was in arms and on foot. Not only was victory impossible to the conspirators, but even for them to attack was folly. Lamartine thanked general Changarnier, whose services were henceforth unnecessary. He entreated him to go and inform his wife of

the triumph of the good citizens, and the re-establishment of the public armed force, hitherto a problem, but now brought to a state of certainty.

General Duvivier was on horseback in the square, in the midst of all his battalions of the garde mobile whom he had brought up. Two hours were thus passed in an imposing silence, as if it was sufficient for the national guards to show their two hundred thousand bayonets to the sun to confound every thought of conspiracy and anarchy!

Lamartine, until four o'clock, the only member of government present with Marrast, received the deputations of all these corps, and harangued them, sometimes from the windows, sometimes in the courts, and on the steps of the staircases. The twenty thousand insurgents of the Champ de Mars, after experiencing much obstruction at the extremity of the quays, defiled sorrowfully in the midst of the hootings of the people, between the ranks of the national guards as they went in great dejection to hide themselves at their clubs.

Two hundred thousand bayonets afterwards passed in review before the Hôtel de Ville, with cries of "Iong live Lamartine!" "Down with the Communists!"

All fears for the safety of the country were now at an end. The people had shown their firm determination not to allow themselves to be ridden over by jacobins and terrorists, and that they knew how to combine liberty with law, and revolution with respect for property and order. The general elections took place on Easter Sunday, the 27th of April, in the midst of perfect peace and harmony.

On the 4th of May the national assembly was opened amidst great solemnities. The provisional government then laid down their power. An act of indemnity for all they had done was passed by the assembly, and it was unanimously voted that they had deserved well of their country. An executive commission was then elected, consisting of MM. Arago, Garnier-Pagès, Marie, and Ledru-Rollin. These nominated the ministers to the various departments of the state, and took all measures that were necessary for the proper transaction of the business of the government. But the troubles were not over yet. The communists and terrorists, chagrined at their defeats and disappointments, meditated another attempt like that of the 16th of April, and were instigated and encouraged by two of the ex-members of the provisional government. The conspiracy was to display itself in the form of an immense assemblage, who were to march in procession to the national assembly, under pretence of presenting a petition in favour of Poland. Their designs came to the ears of the government, who took their measures accordingly, but unfortunately their plans miscarried.

At daybreak, on the 15th of May, the generals and the minister of the interior were summoned to the Luxembourg, the seat of government, to give an account of the dispositions which they had made, and to concert new ones. Nothing was neglected which could keep the crowds at a distance from the assembly, and protect the inviolability of the representatives; even should it be found necessary to fire upon them. The chief command was bestowed on general Courtais. It was agreed that twelve thousand men of the national guard should be summoned around the Palais Bourbon, and that the battalions of the mobile guards should take their