Those who recollect the political literature of the years that passed
between the Revolution of February and the commencement of those
disputes which eventuated in the Russian War must blush for humanity.
Writers of every class set themselves about the work of exterminating
Agrarianism in France. Grave arguments, pathetic appeals, and lively
ridicule were all made use of to drive off enemies of whose coming upon
Europe there was no more danger than of a return of the Teutones and the
Cimbri. Had the arguments and adjurations of the clever men who waged
war on the Agrarians been addressed to the dust of the Teutones
whom Marius exterminated in Provence, they could not have been more
completely thrown away than they were. Some of these men, however, were
less distinguished for cleverness than for malignity, and shrieked for
blood and the display of brute force in terms that would have done
dishonor even to a St. Bartholomew assassin or anti-Albigensian
crusader. Monsieur Romieu held up _Le Spectre Rouge_ to the eyes of a
generation 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 Crécy 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