shops, depresses the funds, throws the Exchange
into consternation, suspends commerce, clogs business, precipitates
failures; no more money, private fortunes rendered uneasy, public credit
shaken, industry disconcerted, capital withdrawing, work at a discount,
fear everywhere; counter-shocks in every town. Hence gulfs. It has been
calculated that the first day of a riot costs France twenty millions,
the second day forty, the third sixty, a three days' uprising costs
one hundred and twenty millions, that is to say, if only the financial
result be taken into consideration, it is equivalent to a disaster, a
shipwreck or a lost battle, which should annihilate a fleet of sixty
ships of the line.

"No doubt, historically, uprisings have their beauty; the war of the
pavements is no less grandiose, and no less pathetic, than the war of
thickets: in the one there is the soul of forests, in the other the
heart of cities; the one has Jean Chouan, the other has a Jeanne.
Revolts have illuminated with a red glare all the most original points
of the Parisian character, generosity, devotion, stormy gayety, students
proving that bravery forms part of intelligence, the National Guard
invincible, bivouacs of shopkeepers, fortresses of street urchins,
contempt of death on the part of passers-by. Schools and legions clashed
together. After all, between the combatants, there was only a difference
of age; the race is the same; it is the same stoical men who died at the
age of twenty for their ideas, at forty for their families. The
army, always a sad thing in civil wars, opposed prudence to audacity.
Uprisings, while proving popular intrepidity, also educated the courage
of the bourgeois.

"This is well. But is all this worth the bloodshed? And to the bloodshed
add the future darkness, progress compromised, uneasiness among the
best men, honest liberals in despair, foreign absolutism happy in these
wounds dealt to revolution by its own hand, the vanquished of 1830
triumphing and saying: 'We told you so!' Add Paris enlarged, possibly,
but France most assuredly diminished. Add, for all must needs be told,
the massacres which have too often dishonored the victory of order grown
ferocious over liberty gone mad. To sum up all, uprisings have been
disastrous."

Thus speaks that approximation to wisdom with which the bourgeoisie,
that approximation to the people, so willingly contents itself.

For our parts, we reject this word uprisings as to