is a public robber.

The former has no account to settle with regular legal justice, with
the articles of codes. He has behind him, spying upon and watching him,
hatred in their hearts, and vengeance in their hands, Orloff in his
palace, and Mouravieff among the people; he may be assassinated by one
of his army, or poisoned by one of his family; he runs the risk of
barrack conspiracies, of revolts of regiments, of secret military
societies, of domestic plots, of sudden, mysterious maladies, of
terrible blows, of great catastrophes. The other ought simply to go to
Poissy.

The former has the wherewithal to die in the purple, and to end his
life with pomp and royally, as monarchs end and tragedies. The other
must live; live between four walls behind bars, through which the
people can look at him, sweeping courtyards, making horse-hair brushes
or list shoes, emptying buckets, with a green cap on his head, wooden
shoes on his feet, and straw in his shoes.

Ah! ye leaders of the old parties, ye men of absolutism, in France you
voted _en masse_ among 7,500,000; outside of France you applauded,
taking this Cartouche for the hero of order. He is ferocious enough for
it, I admit; but look at his size. Don't be ungrateful to your real
colossi; you have cashiered your Haynaus and your Radetzkys too
precipitately. Above all, weigh this comparison, which so naturally
presents itself to the mind. What is this Mandrin of Lilliput beside
Nicholas, Czar, Emperor, and Pope, a power half-Bible, half-knout, who
damns and condemns, drills eight hundred thousand soldiers and two
hundred thousand priests, holds in his right hand the keys of paradise,
and in his left hand the keys of Siberia, and possesses, as his
chattel, sixty millions of men--their souls as if he were God, their
bodies as if he were the tomb!

III

If there should not be ere long a sudden, imposing, and overwhelming
catastrophe, if the present situation of the nation should be prolonged
and endure, the grand injury, the fearful injury, would be the moral
injury.

The boulevards of Paris, the streets of Paris, the rural districts and
the towns of twenty departments of France, were strewn on the 2nd of
December with dead and dying citizens; there were seen, before their
thresholds, fathers and mothers slaughtered, children sabred,
dishevelled women in pools of blood, disemboweled by grape-shot; there
were seen, in the houses, suppliants massacred, some shot i