in the struggle to the last, and was close to Vermorel when
wounded at the barricade of the Chateau d'Eau.]

XXXVII.

The queen of the age is the Press. Lately dethroned and somewhat shorn
of her majesty, but still a queen. It is in vain that the press has
sometimes degraded itself in the eyes of honest men by stooping to
applaud and approve of crimes and excesses, that journalists have done
what they can to lower it; still the august offspring of the human mind,
the press, has really lost neither its power nor its fascination.
Misunderstood, misapplied, it may have done some harm, but no one can
question the signal service which it has been able to render, or the
nobility of its mission. If it has sometimes been the organ of false
prophets, its voice has also been often raised to instruct and
encourage.

When last night you went secretly, in a manner worthy of the act, to
seize on the printing presses of the _Journal des Debats_, the _Paris
Journal_, and the _Constitutionnel_, were you aware of what you were
doing? You imagined, perhaps, this act would have no other result than
that of suppressing violently a private concern--which is one kind of
robbery--and of reducing to a state of beggary--which is a crime--the
numerous individuals, journalists, printers, compositors, and others who
are employed on the journal, and who live by its means. You have done
worse than this. You have stopped, as far as it was in your power, the
current of human progress. You have suppressed man's noblest.
right--the right of expressing his opinions to the world; you are no
better than the pickpocket who appropriates your handkerchief. You have
taken our freedom of thought by the throat, and said, "It is in my way,
I will strangle it." Wherefore have you acted thus? To shut the mouths
of those who contradict you, is to admit that you are not so very sure
of being in the right. To suppress the journals is to confess your fear
of them; to avoid the light is to excite our suspicion concerning the
deeds you are perpetrating in the darkness. We shut our windows when we
do not desire to be seen. Little confidence is inspired by closed doors.
Your councils at the Hotel de Ville are secret as the proceedings of
certain legal cases, the details of which might be hurtful to public
morality. Again I say, wherefore this mystery? What strange projects
have you on foot? Do you discuss among you, propositions of a nature
which your modesty dec