on--a liberal in principle, an egotist in practice, wanting, yet
not willing. If there remain any thing French within him, he quiets it
by the reading of some innocently growling, or pacifically warlike
newspaper."

The rich man of to-day was poor yesterday. He was the very artisan, the
soldier, the peasant, whom he now avoids. He has the false notion, that
people gain only by taking from others. He will not let his companions
of yesterday ascend the ladder by which he has mounted, lest in the
ascent he should lose something. He does not know that "every flood of
rising people brings with it a flood of new wealth." He shuts himself up
in his class, in his little circle of habits, closes the door, and
carefully guards--a nonentity. To maintain his position, the rich man
withdraws from the people--is insulated--and, therefore, in bondage.

Here let us stop. What is it that we have seen? The peasant in fetters,
the workman oppressed, the artisan crippled, the manufacturers
embarrassed, the tradesman corrupted, the official in misery, the rich
man exiled--all in bondage, all hating one another, and all
constituting the life and marrow of the great and civilized country, to
whose deplorable condition M. Michelet especially invites our attention.
Deplorable, said we? Oh, far from it! The calamity that would crush any
other nation, has a far different effect upon France. Bondage and hatred
may exist, misery may eat like a canker-worm at the heart of the empire;
but France, great, glorious, military, and beautiful, is consumed only
to rise phoenix-like, fairer and younger, from her ashes. The French
peasant may be in fetters, but he is also the nobleman of the world--the
only nobleman remaining, "whilst Europe has continued plebeian." (!) "It
is said the Revolution has suppressed the nobility, but it is just the
reverse; it has made thirty-four millions of nobles. When an emigrant
was boasting of the glory or his ancestors, a peasant, who had been
successful in the field, replied, '_I am an ancestor_.'" "The strongest
foundation that any nation has had since the Roman empire, is found in
the peasantry of France." "It is by that that France is formidable to
the world, and at the same time ready to aid it; it is this that the
world looks upon with fear and hope. What, in fact, is it? The army of
the future on the day the barbarians appear." If such is the picture of
a peasantry in bondage, what must we expect from a peasantry at