PARIS: October 7, 1872.

MY DEAR MR. CONWAY,

As early as 1846 I published a paper in which I endeavoured to show that the establishment of a second Chamber was fraught with unmitigated evils, and afforded but a sham remedy for the political dangers it was intended to ward off.

By the end of 1848, just at the time when Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was coming forward as a candidate for the Presidential office, I thought it my duty to point out the direful consequences likely to flow from the election of a President. The solemn warning I then gave to my countrymen was expressed as follows:-'Whenever a man and an Assembly stand face to face, that Assembly brings with it a 10 Août, and that man has behind. him an 18 Brumaire.'

But, as you have rightly observed, there are political as well as religious superstitions, nor are the former more easily uprooted than the latter. At the time alluded to it seemed next to impossible that there should be a Republic without a

President. A strange aberration this-more especially on the part of the French, as they had been taught by experience how readily a President or Consul is turned into an Emperor.

However, the warning was disregarded, and on the 2nd of December, 1851, we had to undergo the unspeakable humiliation of another 18 Brumaire. My prediction was thus fulfilled, even sooner than I expected.

Whether we shall know how to turn to account the lesson we have repeatedly received, remains to be seen. I hope it will be so. Certain it is that now-a-days many are they in the Republican party who consider the Presidential office as a mere stepping-stone to ascend the throne. If others have some doubt left as to the necessity, both of a President and a second Chamber, it is because they are under the impression that that system works well in the United States. To correct such an error is to do good service to the cause of Republican institutions.

Faithfully yours,

LOUIS BLANC.

REPUBLICAN SUPERSTITIONS.

THE STATE SUPERSTITION.

I.

A SUPERSTITION is any belief not based upon evidence.

The term is indeed ordinarily associated with unfounded religious beliefs or legends, because religion is a region from which reason has so long been barred whilst admitted in all other departments of inquiry-that the preponderant number of superstitions are found in that direction. Nevertheless, in the proportionate degree in which human concerns approximate religion in importance, superstitions adhere to them.

In medicine, where physical life and death are concerned, it may be tracked from the prescription of the rustic herbalist to the practice of professional men. And

B

in social and political affairs, where home, property, and person are involved, the reformer has to encounter at every step institutions which seem inexpugnable simply because they are based upon conventional prejudice or sentiment, and are therefore not subject to the tests of reason with which they have no ground in common.

And this is one thing which all superstitions, whether political or religious, have in common: they rest upon mere authority. This authority, whether it have visible representative or be the more powerful sanction of immemorial custom, reflects simply the degree of timidity, ignorance, or mental indolence, existing in those who submit to it.

Superstitions agree also in this-they subsist only under the condition that the age or the individual holding them shall be quite unconscious of them. A superstition is no sooner recognised as such than it is either rejected or becomes an hypocrisy. The freest mind, therefore, cannot be sure that no superstition survives in it. Lord Bacon can see the idols of many caves; but his inductive philosophy reveals no absurdity in his recommendation of 'whelps or young healthy

boys applied to the stomach,' as an astringent. Lord Herbert of Cherbury is quite unaware of the smile he is preparing for posterity by praying for -and, as he believes, receiving a revelation from heaven authorising the publication of his work demonstrating the impossibility of a revelation from heaven.

Fortunately, however, we do not all hold the same superstitions. We can each detect the other's delusion, and can bravely unmask every idol but our own. This is the security that each point in the fabric of superstition will in turn feel the fatal touch of scientific thought, and crumble away.

II.

The men who framed the Constitution of the United States were, perhaps, above all their contemporaries in the world, free from both religious and political superstitions. The country planted in the principle of a Church without a Bishop and a State without a King, had finally produced a generation of leaders determined to have a State without a Church-nay, without even the faintest recognition of the Deity or of Christianity. Free