the prospect of being the first to launch a new idea, he finds that he
has, in point of fact, launched his thousand or twelve hundred francs
into a gulf.

"Subscribers are fools who never can be brought to understand that to
go ahead in the intellectual world they must start with more money
than they need for the tour of Europe," say the speculators.

Consequently there is endless warfare between the recalcitrant public
which refuses to pay the Parisian imposts and the tax-gatherer who,
living by his receipt of custom, lards the public with new ideas,
turns it on the spit of lively projects, roasts it with prospectuses
(basting all the while with flattery), and finally gobbles it up with
some toothsome sauce in which it is caught and intoxicated like a fly
with a black-lead. Moreover, since 1830 what honors and emoluments
have been scattered throughout France to stimulate the zeal and
self-love of the "progressive and intelligent masses"! Titles, medals,
diplomas, a sort of legion of honor invented for the army of martyrs,
have followed each other with marvellous rapidity. Speculators in the
manufactured products of the intellect have developed a spice, a
ginger, all their own. From this have come premiums, forestalled
dividends, and that conscription of noted names which is levied
without the knowledge of the unfortunate writers who bear them, and
who thus find themselves actual co-operators in more enterprises than
there are days in the year; for the law, we may remark, takes no
account of the theft of a patronymic. Worse than all is the rape
of ideas which these caterers for the public mind, like the
slave-merchants of Asia, tear from the paternal brain before they are
well matured, and drag half-clothed before the eyes of their blockhead
of a sultan, their Shahabaham, their terrible public, which, if they