bsence of the
spirit of humanity, which characterized those who might have averted
the coming baptism of blood, was the legitimate result of the
anaesthetizing of the soul of the Court and aristocracy with the lust
of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. The divine
spark had disappeared. The spiritual nature had given way to the
sensual. Ambition and pleasure were enthroned in the seats of justice
and humanity. Selfishness was the keynote of aristocratic life. And
with this fact kept in view, the short-sightedness of royalty in the
presence of the rising tide of intelligent discontent is by no means
strange. Indifferent to the fate of the masses in any struggle that
might be precipitated, guided by none of the higher impulses of life,
and possessing implicit confidence in the impregnability of that
triple bulwark of conservatism, the army, the police, and the Church,
the ruling party of French aristocracy drifted down the stream
garlanded with roses, revelling in wine and music, abandoning itself
to pleasure on life's lowest plane.

To the student of social conditions, who might have been a guest of
the philosopher Rousseau, the picture photographed on the mental
retina would have been far different. Above he would have beheld the
round of selfish, thoughtless gaiety, in which the images and
intrigues of Madame Dubarry and Marie Antoinette, of Choiseul and
Rohan, of Louis and Richelieu, were strangely mingled and distorted by
exaggeration, as they sifted down from the Court through several
layers of brains until they reached the world of the newly awakened
laborer. Below him would have yawned, in all its hideousness, the
blackness of the pit, the social cellar into which he would have seen
thousands and scores of thousands of his fellow-men crowded or driven
by want, misfortune, or the avarice of the more powerful, and from
which so few who once fall ever rose to the noble estate of true
manhood and womanhood. Around him he would have noted still another
world, more interesting and yet more terrible in its ferocity and
power than those above and below--the realm of the common people--the
sphere of the masses--the _current_ which passed over the darkest
dregs and bore on its surface the scum. In this world the strange and
interesting phenomenon would have met his eye of a newly awakened
brain, an intellect which after ages of semi-unconsciousness, had, in
a surprisingly short time, been aroused by the