een people and king; and to those who asked: "Who
art thou?" it replied: "I am the truth;" and to those who asked:
"Whence comest thou?" it replied, "I come from France." Then he who had
questioned the principle offered it his hand, and it was better than
the annexation of a province, it was the annexation of a human mind.
Thenceforth, between Paris, the metropolis, and that man in his
solitude, and that town buried in the heart of the woods or of the
steppes, and that people groaning under the yoke, a current of thought
and of love was established. Under the influence of these currents
certain nationalities grew weak, whilst others waxed strong and rose
again. The savage felt himself less savage, the Turk less Turk, the
Russian less Russian, the Hungarian more Hungarian, the Italian more
Italian. Slowly, and by degrees, the French spirit assimilated the
other nations, for universal progress. Thanks to this admirable French
language, composed by Providence, with wonderful equilibrium, of enough
consonants to be pronounced by the nations of the North, and of enough
vowels to be pronounced by the peoples of the South; thanks to this
language, which is a power of civilization and of humanity, little by
little, and by its radiation alone, this lofty central tribune of Paris
conquered the nations and made them France. The material boundary of
France was such as she could make it; but there were no treaties of
1815 to determine her moral frontier. The moral frontier constantly
receded and broadened from day to day; and before a quarter of a
century, perhaps, one would have said the French world, as one said the
Roman world.

That is what the tribune was, that is what it was accomplishing for
France, a prodigious engine of ideas, a gigantic factory ever elevating
the level of intelligence all over the world, and infusing into the
heart of humanity a vast flood of light.

And this is what M. Bonaparte has suppressed!

VIII

PARLIAMENTARISM

Yes, that tribune M. Bonaparte has overthrown. That power, created by
our revolutionary parturition, he has broken, shattered, crushed, torn
with his bayonets, thrown under the feet of horses. His uncle uttered
an aphorism: "The throne is a board covered with velvet." He, also, has
uttered his: "The tribune is a board covered with cloth, on which we
read, _Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite_." He has thrown board and cloth,
and Liberty and Equality and Fraternity, into the fire of a