the French army is mainly conscribed, and which, containing numerous small property-holders, is fanatically attached to the name of Napoleon.  Thus the cry of “Property in danger” ended, in 1851, in the restoration of open despotism, which every sensible observer of French affairs expected after Louis Napoleon was made President, his Presidency being looked upon only as a pinch-beck imitation of the Consulate of 1799-1804.  This is the ordinary course of events in old countries:  revolution, fears of Agrarianism, and the rushing into the jaws of the lion in order to be saved from the devouring designs of a ghost.

Those who recollect the political literature of the years that passed between the Revolution of February and the commencement of those disputes which eventuated in the Russian War must blush for humanity.  Writers of every class set themselves about the work of exterminating Agrarianism in France.  Grave arguments, pathetic appeals, and lively ridicule were all made use of to drive off enemies of whose coming upon Europe there was no more danger than of a return 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