moral significance of those two emblems of State and Religion whose
accord is only possible to the confused reasoning of an average man. But
the reasoning of M. Anatole France is never confused. His reasoning is
clear and informed by a profound erudition. Such is not the case of
Crainquebille, a street hawker, charged with insulting the constituted
power of society in the person of a policeman. The charge is not true,
nothing was further from his thoughts; but, amazed by the novelty of his
position, he does not reflect that the Cross on the wall perpetuates the
memory of a sentence which for nineteen hundred years all the Christian
peoples have looked upon as a grave miscarriage of justice. He might
well have challenged the President to pronounce any sort of sentence, if
it were merely to forty-eight hours of simple imprisonment, in the name
of the Crucified Redeemer.

He might have done so. But Crainquebille, who has lived pushing every
day for half a century his hand-barrow loaded with vegetables through the
streets of Paris, has not a philosophic mind. Truth to say he has
nothing. He is one of the disinherited. Properly speaking, he has no
existence at all, or, to be strictly truthful, he had no existence till
M. Anatole France's philosophic mind and human sympathy have called him
up from his nothingness for our pleasure, and, as the title-page of the
book has it, no doubt for our profit also.

Therefore we behold him in the dock, a stranger to all historical,
political or social considerations which can be brought to bear upon his
case. He remains lost in astonishment. Penetrated with respect,
overwhelmed with awe, he is ready to trust the judge upon the question of
his transgression. In his conscience he does not think himself culpable;
but M. Anatole France's philosophical mind discovers for us that he feels
all the insignificance of such a thing as the conscience of a mere street-