being kept in chains, exercise their limbs on escaping in vehement
jumps without definite object. The directors of emancipated opinion may
thus be terrible enemies to the Imperial Government, but they will
be very unsafe councillors to France. Concurrently with this divorce
between the Imperial system and the national intellect,--a divorce
so complete that even your salons have lost their wit, and even your
caricatures their point,--a corruption of manners which the Empire, I
own, did not originate, but inherit, has become so common that every
one owns and nobody blames it. The gorgeous ostentation of the Court
has perverted the habits of the people. The intelligence abstracted from
other vents betakes itself to speculating for a fortune; and the greed
of gain and the passion for show are sapping the noblest elements of the
old French manhood. Public opinion stamps with no opprobrium a minister
or favourite who profits by a job; and I fear you will find that jobbing
pervades all your administrative departments."

"All very true," said De Breze, with a shrug of the shoulders and in
a tone of levity that seemed to ridicule the assertion he volunteered;
"Virtue and Honour banished from courts and salons and the cabinet of
authors ascend to fairer heights in the attics of ouvriers."

"The ouvriers, ouvriers of Paris!" cried this terrible German.

"Ay, Monsieur le Comte, what can you say against our ouvriers? A German
count cannot condescend to learn anything about ces petites gens."

"Monsieur," replied the German, "in the eyes of a statesman there are
no petites gens, and in those of a philosopher no petites choses. We in
Germany have too many difficult problems affecting our working classes
to solve, not to have induced me to glean all the information I can as
to the ouvriers of Paris. They have among them men of aspirations as
noble as can animate the souls of philosophers and poets, perhaps not
the less noble because common-sense and experience cannot follow their
flight; but as a body the ouvriers of Paris have not been elevated in
political morality by the benevolent aim of the Emperor to find them
ample work and good wages independent of the natural laws that regulate
the markets of labour. Accustomed thus to consider the State bound to
maintain them, the moment the State fails in that impossible task, they
will accommodate their honesty to a rush upon property under the name of
social reform.

"Have you not noti