it is all that they can do.  The most honest merchants tell you in the most candid way that ’you must get out of a bad bargain as best you can’—­a motto for the most unscrupulous rascality.  Blondet has given you an account of the Lyons affair, its causes and effects, and I proceed in my turn to illustrate my theory with an anecdote:—­There was once a woolen weaver, an ambitious man, burdened with a large family of children by a wife too much beloved.  He put too much faith in the Republic, laid in a stock of scarlet wool, and manufactured those red-knitted caps that you may have noticed on the heads of all the street urchins in Paris.  How this came about I am just going to tell you.  The Republic was beaten.  After the Saint-Merri affair the caps were quite unsalable.  Now, when a weaver finds that besides a wife and children he has some ten thousand red woolen caps in the house, and that no hatter will take a single one of them, notions begin to pass through his head as fast as if he were a banker racking his brains to get rid of ten million francs’ worth of shares in some dubious investment.  As for this Law of the Faubourg, this Nucingen of caps, do you know what he did?  He went to find a pothouse dandy, one of those comic men that drive police sergeants to despair at open-air dancing saloons at the barriers; him he engaged to play the part of an American captain staying at Meurice’s and buying for export trade.  He was to go to some large hatter, who still had a cap in his shop window, and ‘inquire for’ ten thousand red woolen caps.  The hatter, scenting business in the wind, hurried round to the woolen weaver and rushed upon the stock.  After that, no more of the American captain, you understand, and great plenty of caps.  If you interfere with the freedom of trade, because free trade has its drawbacks, you might as well tie the hands of justice because a crime sometimes goes unpunished, or blame the bad organization of society because civilization produces some evils.  From the caps and the Rue Saint-Denis to joint-stock companies and the Bank ——­draw your own conclusions.”

“A crown for Couture!” said Blondet, twisting a serviette into a wreath for his head.  “I go further than that, gentlemen.  If there is a defect in the working hypothesis, what is the cause?  The law! the whole system of legislation.  The blame rests with the legislature.  The great men of their districts are sent up to us by the provinces, crammed with parochial notions of right and wrong; and ideas that are indispensable if you want to keep clear of collisions with justice, are stupid when they prevent a man from rising to the height at which a maker of the laws ought to abide.  Legislation may prohibit such and such developments of human passions—­gambling, lotteries, the Ninons of the pavement, anything you please—­but you cannot extirpate the passions themselves by any amount of legislation.  Abolish them, you would abolish the society which develops them, even if it does not produce them.  The gambling