protect into enginery of destruction--an
immense standing army--the notorious corruption of officials, and the
audacious dabbling of Ministers in the stocks, if not the King himself,
by means of information obtained by the Government telegraph, and
withheld from the people, or of information manufactured by the
telegraph designed to affect the Bourse--the unprecedented number of
placemen occupying seats in the Chamber of Deputies, yet receiving
exorbitant salaries as incumbents of civil offices, one man being often
in receipt of the salaries of several offices, though performing the
duties of none--the fact that Ministers have maintained majorities by
unblushing bribery in elections--that hardly one man in two hundred is
an elector--the profligate arts of corruption by which every able man is
bought by the Court--the disgraceful censorship of the press and the
drama--the enormous appropriations for the civil list, wrung out by
grinding taxes from the toil and sweat of millions--the absurd
assumption, yet the monstrous power, over the press and its conductors,
of that conclave of hoary dotards called the Chamber of Peers--the utter
and most impious disregard of the deprivation and misery of the
operative and laborer, although arrayed side by side with the insolence
and wealth pampered by the taxes torn from themselves--the total
forgetfulness of the self-evident truth of the right of all men to
labor, unrestricted by the baleful influences of the competition of
capitalists--these facts, properly urged and set forth by the press,
from the tribune and in the clubs, in connection with due enlightenment
of the masses upon their rights as to labor and its reward and the duty
of government thereupon could not fail to prepare the popular mind, all
over France, and all over Europe, for reform--for revolution."

"Unquestionably," cried Louis Blanc, "such would be the effect; and it
would not only prepare the people for reform, and stimulate them to
obtain it, but it would make them Republicans--true
Republicans--American Republicans! The Americans do not plume themselves
on the title citizen, but they work; they dispute little about words,
but clear their lands; they do not talk of exterminating anybody, but
they cover the sea with their ships, they construct immense canals,
roads and steamers without jabbering at every stroke of the spade about
the rights of man. With them, labor, merit, talent and honest opulence
are honored an