r pride was centered in a
silver crucifix, "that keeps a man from harm"; their conscience
committed to a priest; their labors for the rich; their days the same,
from the rising of the sun to its going down. They did not love, and
their hate was but a peevish dislike. They followed their dull routine
and died the death, hopeful that they would get the reward in another
world which was denied them in this.

And Jean Paul Marat grew to scorn the few who would thus enslave the
many. For priest and publican he had only aversion.

Jean Paul Marat, the bantam, read Voltaire and steeped himself in
Rousseau, and the desire grew strong upon him to do, to dare and to
become.

Tourists had told him of England, and like all hopeful and childlike
minds, he imagined the excellent to be far off, and the splendid at a
distance: Great Britain was to him the Land of Promise.

In the countenance of young Marat was a strange mixture of the ludicrous
and the terrible. This, with his insignificant size, and a bodily
strength that was a miracle of surprise, won the admiration of an
English gentleman; and when the tourist started back for Albion, the
lusty dwarf rode on the box, duly articled, without consent of his
parents, as a valet.

As a servant he was active, alert, intelligent, attentive. He might have
held his position indefinitely, and been handed down to the next
generation with the family plate, had he kept a civil tongue in his red
head and not quoted Descartes and Jean Jacques.

He had ideas, and he expressed them. He was the central sun below
stairs, and passed judgment upon the social order without stint, even
occasionally to argufying economics with his master, the Baron, as he
brushed his breech.

This Baron is known to history through two facts: first, that Jean Paul
Marat brushed his breeches, and second, that he evolved a new breed of
fices.

Now, the master was rich, with an entail of six thousand acres and an
income of five thousand pounds, and very naturally he was
surprised--amazed--to hear that any one should question the divine
origin of the social order.

Religion and government being at that time not merely second cousins,
but Siamese twins, Jean Paul had expressed himself on things churchly as
well as secular.

And now, behold, one fine day he found himself confronted with a charge
of blasphemy, not to mention another damning count of contumacy and
contravention.

In fact, he was commanded not to thi