defauts_ after all. The clash of speculative opinions is dreadful here,
practical men catch at the ideal as if it were a loaf of bread, and they
literally set about cutting out their Romeos 'into little stars,' as if
that were the most natural thing in the world. As for the socialists, I
quite agree with you that various of them, yes, and some of their chief
men, are full of pure and noble aspiration, the most virtuous of men and
the most benevolent. Still, they hold in their hands, in their clean
hands, ideas that kill, ideas which defile, ideas which, if carried out,
would be the worst and most crushing kind of despotism. I would rather
live under the feet of the Czar than in those states of perfectibility
imagined by Fourier and Cabet, if I might choose my 'pis aller.' All
these speculators (even Louis Blanc, who is one of the most rational)
would revolutionalise, not merely countries, but the elemental
conditions of humanity, it seems to me; none of them seeing that
antagonism is necessary to all progress. A man, in walking, must set one
foot before another, and in climbing (as Dante observed long ago) the
foot behind 'e sempre il piu basso.' Only the gods (Plato tells us) keep
both feet joined together in moving onward. It is not so, and cannot be
so, with men.

But I think that not only in relation to the socialists, but to the
monarchies, is L.N. the choice of the French people. I think that they
will not _bear_ the monarchies, they will not have either of them, they
put them away. It seems to me that the French people is essentially
democratical, and that by the vote in question they never meant to give
away either rights or liberties. The extraordinary part of the actual
position is that the Government, with these ugly signs of despotism in
its face, stands upon the democracy (is no 'military despotism,'
therefore, in any sense, as the English choose to say), and may be
thrown, and will be thrown, on that day when it disappoints the popular
expectation. For my part, I am hopeful both for this reason and for
others. I hope we shall do better, when there is greater calm; that
presently there will be relaxation where there is stringency, and room
to breathe and speak. At present it is a dictatorship, and we can't
expect at such a time the ease and liberty of a regular government. The
constitution itself may be modified, as the very terms of it imply, and
the laws of the Press not carried out. Even as it is, all the