ubmit calmly
to have your throat cut for the good of society. M. Marat was a logician
of this sort, and M. Romieu is, after all, only a pale imitator of the
cracked horse-leech; but as he wrote in the interest of "order," and for
the preservation of property, we rarely hear of his thirst for blood.
Had he been a disciple of Marat, his words would have been quoted
annually in every abode of civilized men from Sacramento to Astrachan,
as evidence of the desire of popular leaders to lap blood.

What has become of M. Romieu, and how he took Louis Napoleon's energetic
measures for laying the Red Ghost in the blood of aristocrats as well as
of democrats, we know not. He ought to have been charmed with the _coup
d'etat_; for the man who conceived and executed that measure for his
own benefit professed to act only for the benefit of society, the
maintenance of the rights of property being kept by him especially in
view. He, too, charged his enemies, or those whom he thought endowed
with the desire and the ability to resist him, with Agrarianism; and
such Agrarians as Thiers and Cavaignac were seized in their beds, and
imprisoned,--to prevent their running away with the Great Book of
France, one is at liberty to suppose. There was something shockingly
ludicrous in charging the hero and victor of the Days of June with
designs against property; but the charge may have led Cavaignac to have
doubts whether he had not himself been a little too ready to believe
the charge of Agrarianism when preferred against a large number of the
people of France, whom he had treated with grape-shot by way of teaching
them respect for the rights of property. There is nothing like bringing
injustice home to a man to open his eyes to its evil nature. Of all
public men of our generation who have signally failed, Cavaignac must
be held the most unfortunate; for his intentions were excellent, and he
died just as circumstances were about to afford him an opportunity to
retrieve his fame. His last days must have been the reverse of agreeable
in their retrospect; for it must constantly have been forced upon his
mind that he had been made the chief instrument in the work of fastening
upon the country he loved the most odious of the many despotic
governments it has known,--a government that confesses its inability to
stand against the "paper shot" of journalists, and which has shackled
the press after the fashion of Austrian and Russian dynasties; and all
this