Fourthly, there would be an obvious national advantage in some countries, in which the government is at one and the same time busily engaged in finding cheap food for the people, and in transporting annually many hundreds of political suspects to killing colonies.  It is, indeed, surprising, that so sagacious and parental a government as that of Napoleon the Third,—­may His Majesty be long preserved for the civilization of France, the peace of Europe, and the glory of mankind in general!—­it is surprising, that his all-providing and all-foreseeing government has not long ago discovered how the craving of the national stomach for food, and of the popular mind for political purification, might be stilled by no longer transporting political offenders and suspects to French Guiana or Lambessa, where they uselessly and ignobly perish, but by sentencing them, instead, to the enviable lot of making a feast for their brethren.  Would not every Socialist, receiving permission thus to help feed society, exclaim:  C’est magnifique! mais c’est sublime!

When Robespierre was in the zenith of his guillotinacious glory, the bonnes would sit around the scaffold, minding children and knitting stockings, to see the head of a marquis or of a shoemaker fall.  We leave it to every reader, whether there would not be more historic unity and poetic completeness in the tableau, were we to read that these good creatures dined upon the ci-devant, after the execution.

Imperial Rome is the beau ideal of the present government of la belle France; and we must own, that, when perusing the exhilarating pages of Suetonius, it has often occurred to our mind that there is something wanting in the list of high deeds related of those superb specimens of humanity exhibited in the Caligulas and Heliogabali.  They did so much for cookery!  Yet they seem never to have risen above an indirect consumption of their subjects, by feeding their lobsters with ignoble slaves; never did they directly bestow upon Roman freemen the honor of being served up for the imperial table.  Nero murdered his mother and bade his teacher open his own veins.  Would it not read much more civilized, if the annals of the empire were telling us:  Nero, jam divus, leniter dixit:  O Seneca, Pundit delectabilis et philosophe laute, quis dubitet te libentissime mihi hodie proferre artocreatem stoicum?

Strange as it may appear to some readers, that thus the polished Romans might have learned a lesson of civilization from the Fijians, they will not reject our suggestion, when they reflect, that, only a short time ago, they were, probably, as much surprised at finding the government of so great a country as France adopting imperial Rome as a model body-politic.  Familiarize your mind with the idea, and all difficulties vanish.  It is only the last step which costs,—­not the first.