On the Pont Royal a little crowd was collected around one or two men of the labouring classes, who were discussing the causes of the disturbance.  First questioning a respectable-looking by-stander as to the rumours, I mingled with the throng, in order to get an idea of the manner in which the people regarded the matter.  It would seem that a collision had taken place between the troops and a portion of the citizens, and that a charge had been made by a body of cavalry on some of the latter, without having observed the formalities required by the law.  Some of the people had raised the cry “aux arms;” several corps de garde had been disarmed, and many thousands were rallying in defence of their liberties.  In short everything wore the appearance of the commencement of another revolution.  The point discussed by the crowd, was the right of the dragoons to charge a body of citizens without reading the riot act, or making what the French call, the “sommations.”  I was struck with the plain common sense of one or two of the speakers, who were of the class of artisans, and who uttered more good reason, and displayed more right feeling, in the five minutes I listened, than one is apt to meet with, on the same subjects, in a year, in the salons of Paris.  I was the more struck by this circumstance, in consequence of the manner in which the same topic had been broached, quite lately, in the Chamber of Deputies.

In one of the recent affairs in the east of France, the troops had fired on a crowd, without the previous sommations, in consequence, as was alleged, of some stones being hurled from the crowd against themselves.  Every one, who has the smallest knowledge of a government of laws, understands its action in an affair of this sort.  Ten thousand people are in a street, in their own right, and half a dozen of them commit an outrage.  Military force becomes necessary, but before it is applied certain forms are required, to notify the citizen that his ordinary rights are suspended, in the interests of public order, and to warn him to go away.  This is a provision that the commonest intellect can understand; and yet some of the leading administration men, lawyers too, maintained that soldiers had the rights of other men, and if stones were hurled at them from a crowd, they were perfectly justifiable in using their arms against that crowd!  It is only necessary, you will perceive, to employ an agent, or two, to cast a few stones from a crowd, to place every collection of citizens at the mercy of an armed force, on this doctrine.  A soldier has the right of a citizen to defend himself beyond dispute, against the man who assails him; but a citizen who is assailed from a crowd has no right to discharge a pistol into that crowd, by way of defending himself.  But this is of a piece with most of the logic of the friends of exclusion.  Their cause is bad, and their reasoning is necessarily bad also.