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'état_; 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