e
a new idea. Do not condemn them; the Friend of all who are persecuted
has said with His heroic indulgence: "They know not what they do."

An active nationalist newspaper was eager in stirring up the evil
instincts that lay below the surface. It lived on the exploitation of
hatred and suspicion, which it called "working for the regeneration
of France,"--France being reduced to this paper and its friends. It
published "Cleramboche," a collection of sanguinary articles, like
those which succeeded so well against Jaures; it roused people by
declaring that the traitor owed his safety to occult influences, and
that he would make his escape, if he were not carefully watched; and
finally it appealed to popular justice.

Victor Vaucoux hated Clerambault; not that he knew him at all; it is
not necessary to know a man in order to hate him; but if he had known
him he would have detested him still more. He was his born enemy
before he even knew that Clerambault existed. There are races among
minds more antagonistic to each other, in all countries, than those
divided by a different skin or uniform.

He was a well-to-do _bourgeois_ from the west of France and belonged
to a family of former servants of the Empire who had been sulking for
the last forty years in a sterile opposition. He had a small property
in the Charente, where he spent the summer, and passed the rest of
the time in Paris. Having instincts for government which he could not
satisfy, he laid the blame for this on his family and on life, and
thus thwarted, his character had grown tyrannical so that he acted the
despot unconsciously to those nearest to him, as a right and duty that
could not be disputed. The word tolerance had no meaning for him; for
_he could not make a mistake_. Nevertheless he possessed intelligence,
and moral vigour; he even had a heart, but all wrapped about and
knotted like an old tree-trunk till such forces of expansion as he had
within him were stunted. He could absorb nothing from the outside;
when he read or travelled he saw everything with hostile eyes, his one
wish was to go home; and as the bark was too thick to be penetrated,
all his sap came from the foot of the tree--from the _dead_.

He was the type of that portion of the race which, stubborn but
outworn, has not life enough to spread itself abroad, and shrinks into
a sentiment of aggressive self-defence. This looks with suspicion and
antipathy on the young forces which overfl