Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 18, April, 1859

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 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 France, one is at liberty to suppose. There was something shockingly ludicrous in charging the hero and victor of the Days of June with designs against property; but the charge may have led Cavaignac to have doubts whether he had not himself been a little too ready to believe the charge of Agrarianism when preferred against a large number of the people of France, whom he had treated with grape-shot by way of teaching them respect for the rights of property. There is nothing like bringing injustice home to a man to open his eyes to its evil nature. Of all public men of our generation who have signally failed, Cavaignac must be held the most unfortunate; for his intentions were excellent, and he died just as circumstances were about to afford him an opportunity to retrieve his fame. His last days must have been the reverse of agreeable in their retrospect; for it must constantly have been forced upon his mind that he had been made the chief instrument in the work of fastening upon the country he loved the most odious of the many despotic governments it has known,—a government that confesses its inability to stand against the "paper shot" of journalists, and which has shackled the press after the fashion of Austrian and Russian dynasties; and all this had taken place, as he must have seen in his retirement, as the consequence of his having mistaken the voice of a party for the voice of France. The lesson is one that ought to go home to the hearts of all public men, and to those of American statesmen in particular, some of the ablest of whom are now engaged in doing the behests of an oligarchical faction in the name of the interests of property.

A slow and weary walk had Mr. Lindsay from the station to his house. It was after sunset, dark and cold, as he turned in at the gate. The house was dimly lighted, and no one save the Newfoundland dog came to greet him at the door. He did not hear his daughter singing as she was accustomed at evening. There were no pleasant voices, no light and cheerful steps in the rooms. All was silence. The ill news had preceded him. His wife without a word fell on his bosom and wept. Clara kept her seat, trying in vain, while her lip quivered and her eyes dimmed, to fix her attention upon the magazine she had held rather than read. At length Mr. Lindsay led his wife to the sofa and sat beside her, holding her hand with a tenderness that was as soothing as it was uncommon. Prosperity had not hardened his heart, but business had preoccupied it; though his manner had been kind, his family had rarely seen in him any evidence of feeling.

Misfortune had now brought back the rule of his better nature, and the routine life he had led was at an end.

"My dear wife, what I have most dreaded in this crash is the pain, the anxiety, and the possible discomfort it would bring to you and to Clara. For myself I care nothing. It is a hard trial, but I shall conform to our altered circumstances cheerfully."

"And so shall we, father," said Clara. "We shall be happy with you anywhere."

"One thing, I am sure, you can never lose," said Mrs. Lindsay,—"and that is an honorable name."

"I have tried to do my duty. I gave up only when I found I must. But my duty is not yet done."

"Why, father?"

"My creditors have claims which I regard as sacred, and which must be paid, ultimately, at whatever sacrifice."

"Won't the property at the store be enough when you can sell it?" asked Mrs. Lindsay. "You have spoken of the quantity of goods you had on hand."

"I can't say, my dear. It depends upon how much time I have. If I could have effected sales, I should have been safe."