en I find these conclusions of mine not
obscurely foreshadowed as impending in 1872 by Ernest Renan, and
re-affirmed as imminent in 1882 by Jules Simon?

'The edifice of our chimaeras,' cried Ernest Renan in 1872,[9] 'has
melted away like fairy castles in a dream.

[9] _La Reforme intellectuelle et morale._ Ernest Renan. Paris,
1872.

Presumption, puerile vanity, insubordination, feather-headedness,
inability to grasp many different ideas at a glance, want of scientific
sense, simple and stupid ignorance, here is the summary of our history
for a year!... The Opposition, which pretended to have revolutionary
remedies for all possible ills, has found itself at the end of a few
days as unpopular as the fallen dynasty. The Republican Party, puffed up
with the fatal errors which for half a century have been current as to
the history of the Revolution, and which imagined itself able to play
over again a game won eighty years ago only through circumstances
utterly unlike those of to-day, has learned that it was a lunatic taking
visions for realities. The legend of the Empire has been slain by
Napoleon III. The legend of 1792 has been done to death by M. Gambetta.
The legend of the Terror (for even the Terror had its legend among us!)
has been hideously parodied by the Commune.'

So cried M. Renan in 1872.

'Our worst disasters,' said M. Jules Simon in 1882,[10] 'have so far
broken out only where great numbers of men are crowded together. Men
begin with scepticism, from scepticism they go on rapidly to Nihilism,
and from Nihilism to Social War. The labourer in the fields still has
his faith; he still has his hope of another life; he has not yet
unlearned the name of God. When he becomes a Nihilist we shall have the
Commune in our cities, and beyond them the Jacqueries! It is impossible
that the authorities should not see this. But the authorities obey the
deputy, the deputy obeys the elector, and the elector obeys the
agitator.'

[10] _Dieu, Patrie, Liberte._ Par Jules Simon. Paris, 1882.

'There will soon be only two parties left in France; the party of the
dynamiters, and the party of the do-nothings. Whatever moderate
Republicans are left must go over either to violence or to
indifference. Is it France alone which is thus threatened? It is the
world. The Communists and the Fenians were not produced in France. But
France attracts them.

'The liberty you pretend to be establishing is oppression. The neutr