which it was supposed to cure. Popular fury was aroused to such a
height, that a monster mass meeting was held _against_ Pasteur. Louise
Michel addressed this meeting with her customary vigor of speech and
amidst frantic applause shouted this unqualified remark, "_Scientific
questions should be settled by the people._"

By this time everybody was talking about microbes, and a shop on the
boulevards announced an exhibition of them. They used what is known as a
solar microscope and threw on a screen, suitably enlarged, the
animalculae which grow in impure water, the larvae of mosquitoes, and
other insects, which bear about the same relation to microbes that an
elephant does to a flea. I went into this establishment, and saw the
plain people with their wives looking at the exhibition very seriously
and really believing that they saw the famous microbes. One of them near
me said, with a knowing air, "What won't science do next?"

I was indignant, and I had all I could do to keep from saying: "They are
fooling you. What they are showing you is not Science, at the most only
its antechamber. As for you who are deceiving these naïve good people,
you are only impostors."

But I kept still; I would only have succeeded in getting thrown out. But
I said to myself--and I still say--"Why not enlighten these people, who
obviously want light?" It is impossible to _teach_ them science, but it
should be possible to make them at least comprehend what science _is_,
for they have no idea of it now. They do not know--in this era when they
are constantly talking about their rights and urged to demand more wages
and less work--that there are young people who are spending their best
years and leading a precarious existence, working day and night, without
hope of personal profit, with no other end in view besides the hope of