Lyons in order; and before the mob of the capital can hope to control the executive, it must not only reckon with the garrison, but march unopposed to Versailles. Still, though the elements of confusion are weakened, they are not uprooted. The workmen in the great French cities who in their hearts reject M. Gambetta's leadership, and look forward to the day when the Commune shall once more be proclaimed, may be counted by the hundred thousand. But formidable as this calculation may seem, it is only formidable so long as the numbers arrayed against these hundreds of thousands are forgotten. The Conservatives of France may be counted by millions. With one exception they have everything that the socialist workmen have, and in far greater abundance. They have means, and organization, and physical strength, and a motive for which to use all these advantages. What they have hitherto lacked is the resolution to fight, which springs from the confidence that will fight with success. All the schemes for reducing the power of the dangerous classes which have been concocted with so much ingenuity have been vitiated by one cardinal error. They have aimed at weakening the revolutionary element in the country, instead of at utilizing and making evident the immensely superior strength of the anti-revolutionary element. Nothing but wholesale massacre can effect the former purpose, inasmuch as the force which makes the socialist workmen dangerous is the force of resolute arms. But the gain to the Conservative cause will be just as great if the socialist workmen are brought to realize the hopelessness of insurrection by contemplating the power of their adversaries as if they arrived at the same result by contemplating their own weakness. This latter conviction it is within the compass of the party of order to convey to their minds. If the French Conservatives will understand that political supremacy belongs, and rightly belongs, to those who take part in politics, and that inaction in time of peace means helplessness in time of conflict, the republic of the future may be more or less Radical according to the course of events, but in no case will it be Red.
From The Spectator.
THE MENTAL EFFECT OF PECUNIARY PRESSURE.
There are very few men, or at least very few experienced men, who, if granted by Providence or a fairy the fulfilment of some one wish, would not, after deliberate consideration, embody that wish in the words "perennial and perfect health." Ill health is such an evil, some forms of ill health comprise in themselves so much of the totality of misery, that very few men who understand the science of life, even if they were capable of deep mental, spiritual, or affectionate feeling, would not ask for health as if it were the sum of blessings. And yet we doubt, studying the record of suicides, whether sickness makes anything like the demand on human fortitude that is made by pecaniary distress, whether half as many people kill themselves in consequence of it, whether it produces anything like the same amount of mental misery. That poor man Hunt, who last week was committed for trial on the charge of murdering his wife and children, or, as he said, for sending them to heaven, was not so much injured by the ill success of his business as he would have been by blindness or a broken back, or any of the worse forms of chronic neuralgia; and yet we all feel that had he been smitten by any of these calamities, he would have submitted quietly where, under pecuniary distress, he took, or tried to take, his fate into his own hand. Except jealousy, there is scarcely any cause of suicide, as revealed in the occasional glimpses the world catches of concealed truths, so potent as pecuniary trouble; and even jealousy seems scarcely to cause misery of an equally acute kind. People commit murder, suicide, forgery, and all the crimes of greed every day under the compulsion of a form of suffering which least excuses their crimes to their own minds — your murderer for greed, even when confessing, always tries to invent some higher immediate motive — and which ought, one would think, to admit most of the palliative of hope. Jealousy may be incurable, for it may be well founded. Grief may be irremovable, for it may be founded in that most bitter, unending, unalterable sense of want, which a death can produce, and which bites like one of the strange diseases, seldom seen in Europe, in which permanent and savage hunger is one of the first symptoms. Humiliation may be irremovable, for it
