Considering this excellent scheme, I could not help seeing as
a background to it, a very different and a far darker scene. I could not
help remembering that during these very days, the poorer classes of
another great city had taken up an attitude full of awful lessons to us,
and to every civilized country upon earth. We have been reading of a
hundred thousand armed men encamped in the suburbs of Belleville and
Montmartre, with cannon and mitrailleuses, uttering through their organs,
threats which leave no doubt that the meaning of this movement is--as
some of them boldly phrase it,--a war of the poor against the rich.
There is no mistaking what that means. This madness has been stopped for
the time, we are told, principally (as was to be expected), by the
superior common sense of their wives. But only, I fear, for a time.
Such men will go far, if not this time, then some other time. For they
believe what they say, and know what they want. They have done with
phrases, done with illusions. They are no longer deceived and hampered
by party cries against this and that grievance, real or imaginary, the
abolition of which the working classes demand so eagerly from time to
time, in the vain belief that if it were only got rid of the millennium
would be at hand.
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