And Europe entered into a new phase of existence, altogether unknown to the ancient States. A phase of decomposition within doors and of development beyond the ocean.

The Reformation and the Revolution went not beyond the walls of the Church or the precincts of the monarchical State; they were evidently unable to pull down the old edifice. The gothic roof sank in, the throne leaned over; but the ruins stood. And neither the Reformation nor the Revolution had any prise upon them.

It is very well to be reformed, evangelic, lutheran, protestant, quaker: the Church exists still,--that is to say, liberty of conscience does not exist, or is only an act of individual rebellion. It is very fine to be parliamentary, constitutional, with two houses of parliament or one, with a limited suffrage or with universal suffrage: the lopsided throne always remains, and though every minute the kings tumble off it, new ones are found. In default of a king in a republic (say in France) they have a man of straw which they set upon the throne, and for which they keep the royal parks and palaces, the Tuileries and St. Cloud.

Meanwhile a secular and rationalist Christianity pushes against the Church, not knowing that itself will be first crushed by the falling vault,--and a monarchical republicanism pushes down the throne to seat itself all royally upon it.

The breath of revolutionary life is elsewhere. The torrent has changed its direction, and leaves these old Montagues and Capulets to continue their hereditary struggle in another place. The standard is no longer uplifted against the priest, no longer against the king, no longer against the noble,-but against the heir of all these, against the Master, against the patented monopolizer of the tools of toil. And the revolutionist is no longer either huguenot, or protestant, or liberal; he is called the Workman.

And lo, Europe, her youth once-nay, twice renewed, halts at a third limit, not daring to pass. She trembles at that word Socialism which she reads upon her door! She has been told that Catiline will open the door. It is very true. Perhaps the door may not be opened; but if opened, it will be by Catiline; d and a Catiline with too many friends for all of them to be strangled in prison. Cicero-the consciencious and civil assassin-had easier work of it than his colleague Cavaignac.

This limit is more difficult to pass than the others were. All these reformations kept the half of the old world, which they covered with new drapery. The heart was not all broken, nor all quite lost some part of what we loved, of what had been dear to us from infancy, of what we reverenced, what was traditional, remained to console the weak. Adieu, ye nursery songs!-adieu, ye recollections of the paternal home!-adieu, great habit! whose force-says Bacon-is greater than the force of genius.

b Thomas Carlyle says we have much the same thing here--a 'scarecrow:' only the crows are not scared. E. ER.

e Still more frightened since some mad fellows wrote Communism in its place. E. ER.

d

By whom else if the master of the house will not admit the determined guest? E. ER.

Nothing will pass the custom-house during the storm; and will they have patience to wait the calm? e

Little by little all the interests, all the preoccupations, the complications, the aspirations, which during a century have engaged the minds of Europe, pale and become indifferent, mere matters of routine, questions for coteries. Where now are the grand words which made men's hearts to beat and tears to gush into men's eyes? Where are the flags worshiped since John Huss in the one camp, since '89 in the other? When the thick fog which wraps the revolution of February has cleared off we begin to see, plainer and yet more plain, a sharp simplicity replacing all these complications. There are only two real questions.

The SOCIAL QUESTION and the RUSSIAN QUESTION.

And these two are but one. The Russian question is the western side, the negative proof, the new apparition of the barbarians, scenting the death-agony, screaming their memento mori in the ears of the old world, and ready to put it out of the way if it will not die of its own accord.

Indeed, if revolutionary socialism will not come to a conclusion with society in its decline, then Russia will make an end of it instead.

I do not say that it must be so; only that it may.

There is no absolute must. The Future is never immutably decreed before hand; there is no invariable predestination. The Future may not be at all. Some geological catastrophe might put an end not only to the Eastern question, but to all others. No question of that !

The Future is formed, is created of the elements in hand, and of their surrounding conditions; it continues the past; the general tendences, vaguely expressed, are modified according to circumstances. Circumstances determine the law. And the fluctuating possibility becomes the accomplished fact. Russia may as well invade Europe even to the Atlantic as be invaded even to the Oural.

For the first there needs be an Europe deeply divided.

For the second an Europe closely united.

Is she so?

Tzarism is impelled by the instinct of conservatism, and by a natural force— like that which guides the birds-into migrations toward the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. It is impossible not to encounter Europe in this march.

It would be a folly to think that the Emperor Nicholas could make head against Europe unless Europe herself became his vanguard and fought against herself. But this is what she does.

Fearful, careful, senile conservatism, in a conflict between Europe and Russia, will find the means of paralyzing every onward bound of the peoples; as the Ambassadors do in Turkey.

For there are two Europes which hate and detest each other more deeply than do the Turks and Russians; and this manicheism exists in every State, in every town, in every hamlet. What unity of action then can be possible before

Sow the whirlwind first, and then try! E. ER.

the triumph of one of the combatants? The armies fight like heroes outside only when there is a committee of public safety within. It was this which stamped so astonishing an energy, lasting even twenty years after its death.

Nothing in the world so demoralizes armies as the baneful thought of some treason behind their backs. Who can place confidence in governments, such as they are? Even in their own camp the men of order suspect one another. England mistrusts the December adventurer-and, by God, she is in the right. France by tradition is doubtful of perfidious Albion. Prussia's head is so turned that it makes common cause with its most furious enemies; and Austria alone remains unshakenly faithful to her system of treason against all human rights in favour of dynastic interests.

Descending yet a step in the filthy marsh, we find everywhere in the high docks of diplomacy traitors who sell their country to Nicholas, or a whole party which is sold to him.

Nicholas has not only the bankers and the journalists; he has the prime ministers, queens' husbands, kings' brothers, and reigning cousins; he has a prodigious number of grand-duchesses whom he concedes to German princes, on condition that they make Russian serfs of their husbands; and these grand duchesses, when they are ill, go to take the fog at London, Nicholas having discovered its curative effect.

'The fusion' is very Russian; the Assemblée Nationale has quite the air of a journal of Kazan or Pensa. But if the Emperor Nicholas would only abandon all these Chambords-Nemours to the delights of the chase and a family reconciliation at Frohsdorf, Bonapartism would be on the instant not only Russian, but Tartaro-Russian.

The King of the Belgians holds a Russian agency at Brussels. The King of Denmark has a little office at Copenhagen. The Admiralty," the proud Admiralty of Great Britain, acts humbly as the Tzar's police at Portsmouth; and a Samoied officer spurns with impunity the act of habeas corpus, from the deck of an English vessel. The King of Naples is but Nicholas' servile imitator; and the Emperor of Austria his Antinous, his passionate admirer. They talk enough of Russian agents; and always look for them among the few miserable spies which the Russian government pays to get informed of all the gossip of the day. The true Chenus and De-la-Hodes of the Tzar are the Lord's Anointed, their agnates and their cognates, their relations in the ascending and descending lines. The completest register of Russian spies is the Gotha Almanac. i You see then that a serious struggle with Russia is utterly impossible before the house has been swept out, and well swept out.

There is a fatal solidarity which ties reactionary Europe to Tzarism. It is a sublime providental irony, her perishing by his hands.

Perhaps not for money down. But fear as well as cupidity can bargain. Cowards as well as chapmen can sell-a country. E. ER.

8 The organ of the fused Bourbous. E. LR.

Where Metternich's Graham sits in the place of Vane and Blake. E. E.R. The Royal Families' Almanac. Let us hope Queen Victoria is not there. Prince Albert is. E. ER.

Nicholas has played the prettiest trick of the nineteenth century, in declaring war against Turkey.

The conservatives, the very friends and clients of Nicholas, are those who cry out most loudly against him. They took the Tzar for a mere policeman, and were well content to frighten the revolutionists with his 400,000 Russian bayonets; they thought he would be resigned to the quiet part of bugbear; they forgot that even a Louis Bonaparte did not choose to resign himself to the function of a 'fireman.'

The halcyon days came back. They were so happy, so tranquily content; the masses trampled by their troops died of hunger with such christian resignation. There was no press, no tribune, no France. The Holy Father, backed up by an army of police sent by the Prefecture of the Rue de Jerusalem, distributed right and left his apostolic benediction. Business was resumed after the catastrophe of February. The social anthropophagy i was as firm-set as ever. An era of love and sympathy was beginning. Belgium got married to Austria in the person of an Austrian Archduchess; the young Emperor of Vienna sighed at the feet of his betrothed; Napoleon III, that Werther of forty-nine years old, wedded for love his Charlotte de Theba.

In the very midst of this calm, this universal happiness, the Emperor Nicholas flings alarm, by beginning an useless, ridiculous, religious war; a war which may easily pass from the shores of the Black Sea to the banks of the Rhine; and which in any case will bring, to a greater extent, all that was feared from revolutions expropriations, contributions, violences, and foreign occupation and fusillading courts-martial into the bargain.

In a celebrated speech uttered at Madrid in 1849, Donoso Cortes predicted the Russian invasion, and found no other sheet-anchor for civilization except the unity of Authority: that is to say absolute monarchy in the service of Catholicism. On that account he asked as first condition the introduction of Catholicism into England.

It is possible that with such an unity Europe would be strong; but then this unity is utterly impossible: as impossible as any other except the Revolutionary Unity.

If they did not fear the revolution much more than the Russians, what more simple than to go to Sebastopol, to occupy Odessa? The Mahometan population of the Crimea would not be hostile to the Turks. Once there, they might summon Poland, they might proclaim the freedom of the peasants of Little Russia-who abhor serfdom. We should see what Nicholas would undertake then, with his Orthodox God.

But says Austria-Galicia is Polish.

And says Prussia-Posen is Polish.

And Poland once up, what force will keep down Hungary and Lombardy ? Well then, you must not go to Sebastopol. Rather carry on a sham war which will turn to the profit of Nicholas, or of Louis Bonaparte. That is to say, in either case for the advantage of despotism and against the conservatives.

Doubtless our Russian friend uses anthropophagy because the raw word cannibalism would be too shocking to polite ears.

E. ER.

For despotism is not at all conservative. It is not even in Russia. Despotism is the most corrosive, the most deleterious, the most dissolving of all things. Sometimes young peoples, seeking to organize themselves, begin with despotism, traversing it as a hard education; but oftener they are peoples fallen back into infancy who succumb beneath the despotic yoke.

Military despotism-Algerine or Caucasian--Bonapartist or Cossack-once master of Europe will be necessarily drawn into a furious contest with the old society; it can not suffer the existence of half-free institutions, half-independent rights, civilization habituated to speech, science accustomed to analysis, industry raising itself into a power.

Despotism is barbarism; it is the burial of a decrepid civilization; and sometimes the stable in which the Saviour is born.

The European world-such as it is-has finished its task; but methinks it might end its career more honourably; might pass from one form of being to another, not without some shocks, but without abasement, without degradation. Like all misers, the conservatives have most fear of the heir. The old man will only be strangled by thieves and brigands.

After having bombarded Paris, and fusilladed, transported, or imprisoned, the workmen, they thought the danger was over. But Death is a Proteus. Drive him out as the Angel of the Future, he comes back as the Spectre of the Past. Drive him out when he comes in the form of the Democratic and Social Republic, he returns as Nicholas-Tzar of all the Russias, as Napoleon-Tzar of France.

One or the other-or the two together-will finish the struggle.

For a struggle there must be an enemy not yet overthrown, an opposition which will not yield to the first pressure. Where then is the last field, the last trenches in which civilization can give battle, to at least defend itself against the despots?

Paris, like Charles V, living has abdicated its revolutionary crown. A little military glory and plenty of police will suffice to maintain order in Paris. The battle-field is London.

While England remains free and yet proud of its rights, nothing is definitively settled for barbarism.

Since the 10th December, 1848, Russia and Austria have borne no more hate against Paris. Paris has lost its prestige among the kings; they no longer dread it. All their grudge is now transferred to England. They abhor it, detest it, and fain would pillage it.

In continental Europe there are reactionary countries, but none conservative. England only is conservative: and the why is clear: it has something to conserve-personal liberty.

But this one word resumes all which is pursued and hated by the Bonapartes and Nicholases.

And you think that they, conquerors of enslaved Paris, at twelve hours distance, that they will leave London free? London, the very centre of propagandism, with its doors open to all who flee from the fired and desert cities of