these times of Insurrection, must needs lie dormant; capital, as usual,
not circulating, but stagnating timorously in nooks. The poor man is
short of work, is therefore short of money; nay even had he money, bread
is not to be bought for it. Were it plotting of Aristocrats, plotting
of d'Orleans; were it Brigands, preternatural terror, and the clang of
Phoebus Apollo's silver bow,--enough, the markets are scarce of grain,
plentiful only in tumult. Farmers seem lazy to thresh;--being either
'bribed;' or needing no bribe, with prices ever rising, with perhaps
rent itself no longer so pressing. Neither, what is singular, do
municipal enactments, 'That along with so many measures of wheat you
shall sell so many of rye,' and other the like, much mend the matter.
Dragoons with drawn swords stand ranked among the corn-sacks, often
more dragoons than sacks. (Arthur Young, i. 129, &c.) Meal-mobs abound;
growing into mobs of a still darker quality.

Starvation has been known among the French Commonalty before this; known
and familiar. Did we not see them, in the year 1775, presenting,
in sallow faces, in wretchedness and raggedness, their Petition of
Grievances; and, for answer, getting a brand-new Gallows forty feet
high? Hunger and Darkness, through long years! For look back on that
earlier Paris Riot, when a Great Personage, worn out by debauchery, was
believed to be in want of Blood-baths; and Mothers, in worn raiment, yet
with living hearts under it, 'filled the public places' with their wild
Rachel-cries,--stilled also by the Gallows. Twenty years ago, the
Friend of Men (preaching to the deaf) described the Limousin Peasants as
wearing a pain-stricken (souffre-douleur) look, a look past complaint,
'as if the oppression of the great were like the hail and the thunder, a
thing irremediable, the ordinance of Nature.' (Fils Adoptif: Memoires
de Mirabeau, i. 364-394.) And now, if in some great hour, the shock of
a falling Bastille should awaken you; and it were found to be the