be rid. Yonder, in that dolorous faubourg of Paris, he would find
good Abbe Rose, who but a few days previously had written begging him to
return and tend, love, and save his poor, since Rome, so dazzling from
afar, was dead to charity. And around the good and peaceful old priest he
would find the ever growing flock of wretched ones; the little fledglings
who had fallen from their nests, and whom he found pale with hunger and
shivering with cold; the households of abominable misery in which the
father drank and the mother became a prostitute, while the sons and the
daughters sank into vice and crime; the dwellings, too, through which
famine swept, where all was filth and shameful promiscuity, where there
was neither furniture nor linen, nothing but purely animal life. And then
there would also come the cold blasts of winter, the disasters of slack
times, the hurricanes of consumption carrying off the weak, whilst the
strong clenched their fists and dreamt of vengeance. One evening, too,
perhaps, he might again enter some room of horror and find that another
mother had killed herself and her five little ones, her last-born in her
arms clinging to her drained breast, and the others scattered over the
bare tiles, at last contented, feeling hunger no more, now that they were
dead! But no, no, such awful things were no longer possible: such black
misery conducting to suicide in the heart of that great city of Paris,
which is brimful of wealth, intoxicated with enjoyment, and flings
millions out of window for mere pleasure! The very foundations of the
social edifice were rotten; all would soon collapse amidst mire and
blood. Never before had Pierre so acutely realised the derisive futility
of Charity. And all at once he became conscious that the long-awaited
word, the word which was at last springing from the great silent
multitude, the crushed and gagged people was _Justice_! Aye, Justice not
Charity! Charity had only served to perpetuate misery, Justice perhaps
would cure it. It was for Justice that the wretched hungered; an act of
Justice alone could sweep away the olden world so that the new one might
be reared. After all, the great silent multitude would belong neither to
Vatican nor to Quirinal, neither to pope nor to king. If it had covertly
growled through the ages in its long, sometimes mysterious, and sometimes
open contest; if it had struggled betwixt pontiff and emperor who each
had wished to retain it for himself a