their level? Can you not see that if you sow the seeds of reasoning
among the working-classes, you will reap revolt, and be the first to
fall victims? What do they smash in Paris when a riot begins?"

"The street-lamps!" said Nathan; "but we are too modest to fear for
ourselves, we only run the risk of cracks."

"As a nation, you have too much mental activity to allow any
government to run its course without interference. But for that, you
would make the conquest of Europe a second time, and win with the pen
all that you failed to keep with the sword."

"Journalism is an evil," said Claude Vignon. "The evil may have its
uses, but the present Government is resolved to put it down. There
will be a battle over it. Who will give way? That is the question."

"The Government will give way," said Blondet. "I keep telling people
that with all my might! Intellectual power is _the_ great power in
France; and the press has more wit than all men of intellect put
together, and the hypocrisy of Tartufe besides."

"Blondet! Blondet! you are going too far!" called Finot. "Subscribers
are present."

"You are the proprietor of one of those poison shops; you have reason
to be afraid; but I can laugh at the whole business, even if I live by
it."

"Blondet is right," said Claude Vignon. "Journalism, so far from being
in the hands of a priesthood, came to be first a party weapon, and
then a commercial speculation, carried on without conscience or
scruple, like other commercial speculations. Every newspaper, as
Blondet says, is a shop to which people come for opinions of the right
shade. If there were a paper for hunchbacks, it would set forth
plainly, morning and evening, in its columns, the beauty, the utility,
and necessity of deformity. A newspaper is not supposed to enlighten
its readers, but to supply them with congenial opinions. Give any
newspaper time enough, and it will be base, hypocritical, shameless,
and treacherous; the periodical press will be the death of ideas,
systems, and individuals; nay, it will flourish upon their decay. It
will take the credit of all creations of the brain; the harm that it
does is done anonymously. We, for instance--I, Claude Vignon; you,
Blondet; you, Lousteau; and you, Finot--we are all Platos, Aristides,
and Catos, Plutarch's men, in short; we are all immaculate; we may
wash our hands of all iniquity. Napoleon's sublime aphorism, suggested
by his study of the Convention, 'No one individual i