tratum of brutality and ferocity, and of violent and
destructive instincts, to which must be added, if he is French, gaiety,
laughter, and a strange propensity to gambol and act insanely in the
havoc he makes; we shall see him at work.--In the second place, at the
outset, his condition casts him naked and destitute on an ungrateful
soil, on which subsistence is difficult, where, at the risk of death, he
is obliged to save and to economize. Hence a constant preoccupation and
the rooted idea of acquiring, accumulating, and possessing, rapacity and
avarice, more particularly in the class which, tied to the globe, fasts
for sixty generations in order to support other classes, and whose
crooked fingers are always outstretched to clutch the soil whose fruits
they cause to grow;-we shall see this class at work.--Finally, his more
delicate mental organization makes of him from the earliest days an
imaginative being in which swarming fancies develop themselves into
monstrous chimeras to expand his hopes, fears and desires beyond all
bounds. Hence an excess of sensibility, sudden outbursts of emotion,
contagious agitation, irresistible currents of passion, epidemics of
credulity and suspicion, in short, enthusiasm and panic, especially if
he is French, that is to say, excitable and communicative, easily thrown
off his balance and prompt to accept foreign impulsion, deprived of
the natural ballast which a phlegmatic temperament and concentration
of lonely meditations secure to his German and Latin neighbors; and all
this we shall see at work.--These constitute some of the brute forces
that control human life. In ordinary times we pay no attention to them;
being subordinated they do not seem to us formidable. We take it for
granted that they are allayed and pacified; we flatter ourselves that
the discipline imposed on them has made them natural, and that by dint
of flowing between dikes they are settled down into their accustomed
beds. The truth is that, like all brute forces, like a stream or a
torrent, they only remain in these under constraint; it is the dike
which, through its resistance, produces this moderation. Another force
equal to their force had to be installed against their outbreaks and
devastation, graduated according to their scale, all the firmer as they
are more menacing, despotic if need be against their despotism, in any
event constraining and repressive, at the outset a tribal chief, later
an army general, all mod