ightened by high wooden-clogs (sabots); rising on tiptoe to see the
fight; tramping time to it; rubbing their sides with their elbows: their
faces haggard (figures haves), and covered with their long greasy hair;
the upper part of the visage waxing pale, the lower distorting itself
into the attempt at a cruel laugh and a sort of ferocious impatience.
And these people pay the taille! And you want further to take their salt
from them! And you know not what it is you are stripping barer, or
as you call it, governing; what by the spurt of your pen, in its
cold dastard indifference, you will fancy you can starve always with
impunity; always till the catastrophe come!--Ah Madame, such Government
by Blindman's-buff, stumbling along too far, will end in the General
Overturn (culbute generale). (Memoires de Mirabeau, ecrits par Lui-meme,
par son Pere, son Oncle et son Fils Adoptif (Paris, 34-5), ii.186.)

Undoubtedly a dark feature this in an Age of Gold,--Age, at least,
of Paper and Hope! Meanwhile, trouble us not with thy prophecies, O
croaking Friend of Men: 'tis long that we have heard such; and still the
old world keeps wagging, in its old way.

Chapter 1.2.III.

Questionable.

Or is this same Age of Hope itself but a simulacrum; as Hope too often
is? Cloud-vapour with rainbows painted on it, beautiful to see, to sail
towards,--which hovers over Niagara Falls? In that case, victorious
Analysis will have enough to do.

Alas, yes! a whole world to remake, if she could see it; work for
another than she! For all is wrong, and gone out of joint; the inward
spiritual, and the outward economical; head or heart, there is no
soundness in it. As indeed, evils of all sorts are more or less of kin,
and do usually go together: especially it is an old truth, that wherever
huge physical evil is, there, as the parent and origin of it, has
moral evil to a proportionate extent been. Before those five-and-twenty
labouring Millions, for instance, could get that haggardness of face,
which old Mirabeau now looks on, in a Nation calling itself Christian,
and calling man the brother of man,--what unspeakable, nigh infinite
Dishonesty (of seeming and not being) in all manner of Rulers, and
appointed Watchers, spiritual and temporal, must there not, through long
ages, have gone on accumulating! It will accumulate: moreover, it will
reach a head; for the first of all Gospels is this, that a Lie cannot
endure for ever.

In fact, if we pierc