vague ideas about relieving the wants of the poor, Louis Blanc and his associates had, just as all men have them who have heads to see and hearts to feel the existence of social evils. Had they obtained possession of the French government, immediately after Louis Philippe, to use his own words, had played the part of Charles X., they would have failed utterly, as Lamartine and his friends failed, and much sooner too. Lamartine failed as a statesman,—he lacked that power to govern which far less able men than he have exhibited under circumstances even more trying than those into which he so unguardedly plunged,—and Louis Blanc would have been no more successful than the poet. The failure of the "Reds" would have been the more complete, if they had had an opportunity to attempt the realization of the Socialistic theories attributed to them, but which few of their number could ever have entertained. They sought political power for the usual purposes; but as they stood in the way of several other parties, those parties united to crush them, which was done in "the Days of June." It is easy to give a fallen enemy a bad name, and the conquered party on that occasion were stigmatized as the enemies of everything that men hold dear, particular emphasis being laid on their enmity to property, which men hold dearer than all other things combined. The belief seems to have been all but universal throughout Europe, and to have been shared by many Americans, that the party which was conquered in the streets of Paris by Cavaignac was really an organization against property, which it meant to steal, and so afford a lively illustration of the doctrine attributed to it, that property is theft. To this belief, absurd as it was, must we look for the whole course of European history during the last ten years. The restoration of the Napoleonic dynasty in France, the restoration of the Papacy by French soldiers, the reëstablishment of Austrian ascendency over Italy, and the invasion of Hungary by the Russians,—these and other important events that have happened under our eyes, and which have enabled us to see history in the making on a large scale, all are directly traceable to the alarm which property experienced immediately after the class of property-holders had allowed the Revolution of February to take place, and to sweep away that dynasty in which their principles stood incarnate. The French imperial throne is in an especial manner the result of that alarm. When General Cavaignac had succeeded in conquering the "Reds," a military dictatorship followed his victory as a matter of course, and it remained with him to settle the future of France. The principles of his family led him to sympathize with the "oppressed nationalities" which were then struggling in so many places for freedom; and had he interfered decidedly in behalf of the Italians and Hungarians, he would have changed the fate of Europe. He would have become the hero of the great political movement which his country had inaugurated, and his sword would have outweighed the batons of Radetzky and Paskevitsch. Both principle and selfishness pointed to such intervention, and there can be no doubt that the Republican Dictator seriously thought of it. But the peculiarities of his position forbade his following the path that was pointed out to him. As the champion of property, as the chief of the coalesced parties which had triumphed over "the enemies of property" in the streets and lanes of "the capital of civilization," he was required to concentrate his energies on domestic matters. Yet further: all men in other countries who were contending with governments were looked upon by the property party in France as the enemies of order, as Agrarians, who were seeking the destruction of society, and therefore were not worthy of either the assistance or the sympathy of France; so that the son of the old Conventionist of '93 was forced, by the views of the men of whom he so strangely found himself the chief, to become in effect the ally of the Austrian Kaiser and the Russian Czar. The Italians, who were seeking only to get rid of "barbarian" rule, and the Hungarians, who were contending for the preservation of a polity as old as the English Constitution against the destructives of the imperial court, were held up to the world as men desirous in their zeal for revolution to overturn all existing institutions! Aristocrats with pedigrees that shamed those of the Bourbon and the Romanoff were spoken of in language that might possibly have been applicable to the lazzaroni of Naples, that lazzaroni being on the side of the "law and order" classes. As General Cavaignac did nothing to win the affections of the French people, as he was the mere agent of men rendered fierce by fear, it cannot be regarded as strange, that, when the Presidential election took place, he found himself nowhere in the race with Louis Napoleon. He was deserted even by a large portion of the men whose work he had done so well, but who saw in the new candidate for their favor one who could become a more powerful protector of property than the African general,—one who had a name of weight, not merely with the army, but with that multitudinous peasant class from which the French army is mainly conscribed, and which, containing numerous small property-holders, is fanatically attached to the name of Napoleon. Thus the cry of "Property in danger" ended, in 1851, in the restoration of open despotism, which every sensible observer of French affairs expected after Louis Napoleon was made President, his Presidency being looked upon only as a pinch-beck imitation of the Consulate of 1799-1804. This is the ordinary course of events in old countries: revolution, fears of Agrarianism, and the rushing into the jaws of the lion in order to be saved from the devouring designs of a ghost.
Those who recollect the political literature of the years that passed between the Revolution of February and the commencement of those disputes which eventuated in the Russian War must blush for humanity. Writers of every class set themselves about the work of exterminating Agrarianism in France. Grave arguments, pathetic appeals, and lively ridicule were all made use of to drive off enemies of whose coming upon Europe there was no more danger than of a return of the Teutones and the Cimbri. Had the arguments and adjurations of the clever men who waged war on the Agrarians been addressed to the dust of the Teutones whom Marius exterminated in Provence, they could not have been more completely thrown away than they were. Some of these men, however, were less distinguished for cleverness than for malignity, and shrieked for blood and the display of brute force in terms that would have done dishonor even to a St. Bartholomew assassin or anti-Albigensian crusader. Monsieur Romieu held up Le Spectre Rouge to the eyes of a generation incapable, from fright, of distinguishing between a scarecrow and the Apollo. The Red Spectre haunted him, and the people for whom he wrote, as relentlessly as the Gray Spectre came upon the chiefs of Ivor. He saw in the working classes—those men who asked then, as in modern times they have only asked, "leave to toil"—millions of creatures "regimented by hatred," and ready to throw themselves upon society. In the past he saw nothing so much to be admired as the Feudal System, it was so very summary and trenchant in its modes of dealing with masses of men so unreasonable as to grumble when they were starving. In the present, all that he could reverence was the cannonarchy of Russia, which he invoked to restore to France that golden age in which Crécy and Poictiers were fought, and when the Jacquerie illustrated the attachment of the serf to the seigneur. How this invoker of Cossacks and cannon from the Don and the Neva "to regulate the questions of our age" on the Seine and the Marne would have stared, could the curtain that hides the future have been drawn for a moment, to allow him to see a quarter of a million of French, English, and Italian soldiers on the shores of the Euxine, and eight hundred Western cannon raining that "hell-fire" upon the august city of Catherine under which it became a heap of ruins! Yet the man was undoubtedly sincere, as political fools almost invariably are. He had faith in nothing but armies and forts, but his faith in them was of the firmest. He despised the Bourbons and the bourgeoisie alike, and would be satisfied with nothing short of a national chief as irresponsible as Tamerlane; and if he should be as truculent as Tamerlane, it was not difficult to see that M. Romieu would like him all the better for it. Your true fanatic loves blood, and is provokingly ingenious in showing how necessary it is that you should submit calmly to have your throat cut for the good of society. M. Marat was a logician of this sort, and M. Romieu is, after all, only a pale imitator of the cracked horse-leech; but as he wrote in the interest of "order," and for the preservation of property, we rarely hear of his thirst for blood. Had he been a disciple of Marat, his words would have been quoted annually in every abode of civilized men from Sacramento to Astrachan, as evidence of the desire of popular leaders to lap blood.
What has become of M. Romieu, and how he took Louis Napoleon's energetic measures for laying the Red Ghost in the blood of aristocrats as well as of democrats, we know not. He ought to have been charmed with the coup d'état; for the man who conceived and executed that measure for his own benefit professed to act only for the benefit of society, the maintenance of the rights of property being kept by him especially in view. He, too, charged his enemies, or those whom he thought endowed with the desire and
