Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 | Page 9

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 Cr��cy 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 man was undoubtedly sincere, as political fools almost invariably are. He had faith in nothing but armies and forts, but his faith in them was of the firmest. He despised the Bourbons and the bourgeoisie alike, and would be satisfied with nothing short of a national chief as irresponsible as Tamerlane; and if he should be as truculent as Tamerlane, it was not difficult to see that M. Romieu would like him all the better for it. Your true fanatic loves blood, and is provokingly ingenious in showing how necessary it is that you should submit calmly to have your throat cut for the good of society. M. Marat was a logician of this sort, and M. Romieu is, after all, only a pale imitator of the cracked horse-leech; but as he wrote in the interest of "order," and for the preservation of property, we rarely hear of his thirst for blood. Had he been a disciple of Marat, his words would have been quoted annually in every abode of civilized men from Sacramento to Astrachan, as evidence of the desire of popular leaders to lap blood.
What has become of M. Romieu, and how he took Louis Napoleon's energetic measures for laying the Red Ghost in the blood of aristocrats as well as of democrats, we know not. He ought to have been charmed with the _coup d'��tat_; for the man who conceived and executed that measure for his own benefit professed to act only for the benefit of society, the maintenance of the rights of property being kept by him especially in view. He, too, charged his enemies, or those whom he thought endowed with the desire and the ability to resist him, with Agrarianism; and such Agrarians as Thiers and Cavaignac were seized in their beds, and imprisoned,--to prevent their running away with the Great Book of France, one is at liberty to suppose. There was something shockingly ludicrous in charging the hero and victor of the Days of June with designs against property; but the charge may have led Cavaignac to have doubts whether he had not himself been a little too ready to believe the charge of Agrarianism when preferred against a large number of the people of France, whom he had treated with grape-shot by way of teaching them respect for the rights of property. There is nothing like bringing injustice home to a man to open his eyes to its evil nature. Of all public men of our generation who have signally failed, Cavaignac must be held the most unfortunate; for his intentions were excellent, and he died just as circumstances were about to afford him an opportunity to retrieve his fame. His last days must have been the reverse of agreeable in their retrospect; for it must constantly have been forced upon his mind that he had been made the chief instrument in the work of fastening upon the country he loved the most odious of the many despotic governments it has known,--a government that confesses its inability to stand against the "paper shot" of journalists, and which has shackled the press after the fashion of Austrian and Russian dynasties; and all this had taken place, as he must have seen in his retirement, as the consequence of his having mistaken the voice of a party for the voice of France. The lesson is