of the Teutones and the
Cimbri. Had the arguments and adjurations of the clever men who waged
war on the Agrarians been addressed to the dust of the Teutones
whom Marius exterminated in Provence, they could not have been more
completely thrown away than they were. Some of these men, however, were
less distinguished for cleverness than for malignity, and shrieked for
blood and the display of brute force in terms that would have done
dishonor even to a St. Bartholomew assassin or anti-Albigensian
crusader. Monsieur Romieu held up _Le Spectre Rouge_ to the eyes of a
generation incapable, from fright, of distinguishing between a scarecrow
and the Apollo. The Red Spectre haunted him, and the people for whom he
wrote, as relentlessly as the Gray Spectre came upon the chiefs of Ivor.
He saw in the working classes--those men who asked then, as in modern
times they have only asked, "leave to toil"--millions of creatures
"regimented by hatred," and ready to throw themselves upon society. In
the past he saw nothing so much to be admired as the Feudal System, it
was so very summary and trenchant in its modes of dealing with masses
of men so unreasonable as to grumble when they were starving. In the
present, all that he could reverence was the cannonarchy of Russia,
which he invoked to restore to France that golden age in which Crecy and
Poictiers were fought, and when the Jacquerie illustrated the attachment
of the serf to the seigneur. How this invoker of Cossacks and cannon
from the Don and the Neva "to regulate the questions of our age" on the
Seine and the Marne would have stared, could the curtain that hides the
future have been drawn for a moment, to allow him to see a quarter of a
million of French, English, and Italian soldiers on the shores of the
Euxine, and eight hundred Western cannon raining that "hell-fire" upon
the august city of Catherine under which it became a heap of ruins! Yet
the man was undoubtedly sincere, as political fools almost invariably
are. He had faith in nothing but armies and forts, but his faith in
them was of the firmest. He despised the Bourbons and the _bourgeoisie_
alike, and would be satisfied with nothing short of a national chief
as irresponsible as Tamerlane; and if he should be as truculent as
Tamerlane, it was not difficult to see that M. Romieu would like him all
the better for it. Your true fanatic loves blood, and is provokingly
ingenious in showing how necessary it is that you should s