wagons containing the wealth of the Tuileries escorted in 1848? By
the rag-pickers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Rags mounted guard over
the treasure. Virtue rendered these tatterdemalions resplendent. In
those wagons in chests, hardly closed, and some, even, half-open, amid a
hundred dazzling caskets, was that ancient crown of France, studded with
diamonds, surmounted by the carbuncle of royalty, by the Regent diamond,
which was worth thirty millions. Barefooted, they guarded that crown.

Hence, no more Jacquerie. I regret it for the sake of the skilful. The
old fear has produced its last effects in that quarter; and henceforth
it can no longer be employed in politics. The principal spring of the
red spectre is broken. Every one knows it now. The scare-crow scares
no longer. The birds take liberties with the mannikin, foul creatures
alight upon it, the bourgeois laugh at it.

CHAPTER IV--THE TWO DUTIES: TO WATCH AND TO HOPE

This being the case, is all social danger dispelled? Certainly not.
There is no Jacquerie; society may rest assured on that point; blood
will no longer rush to its head. But let society take heed to the manner
in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be feared, but phthisis
is there. Social phthisis is called misery.

One can perish from being undermined as well as from being struck by
lightning.

Let us not weary of repeating, and sympathetic souls must not forget
that this is the first of fraternal obligations, and selfish hearts must
understand that the first of political necessities consists in thinking
first of all of the disinherited and sorrowing throngs, in solacing,
airing, enlightening, loving them, in enlarging their horizon to a
magnificent extent, in lavishing upon them education in every form, in
offering them the example of labor, never the example of idleness,
in diminishing the individual burden by enlarging the notion of the
universal aim, in setting a limit to poverty without setting a limit
to wealth, in creating vast fields of public and popular activity, in
having, like Briareus, a hundred hands to extend in all directions to
the oppressed and the feeble, in employing the collective power for that
grand duty of opening workshops for all arms, schools for all aptitudes,
and laboratories for all degrees of intelligence, in augmenting
salaries, diminishing trouble, balancing what should be and what is,
that is to say, in proportioning enjoyment to effort and a gl