it is the existing state of things."

Henriette was unanswerable. The June massacres which followed swiftly on this letter were a terrible confirmation of her fears. Ernest lived through a period of such sights and sounds and sufferings as would have tried the faith of the firmest believer. His working powers were shattered, his mind haunted by the hideous barbarities of which he was a witness, when on one occasion, bewildered by the continual firing from the Jardin du Luxembourg, where, as he knew, no fighting was going on, he made his way into the house of a friend whose windows overlooked the Garden, and from there he beheld-things best left undescribed. Unfortunately he was so misguided as to describe them to Henriette, though he withheld details of the massacres at the barricades. But even the vengeance of excited soldiers upon helpless prisoners horrified him less than the cold deliberate cruelty of "those enlightened people, those preservers of order (les personnes sages, les conservateurs), who for their own safety's sake encouraged the bloodshed, and congratulated themselves upon the rising numbers of victims. To Ernest the brutality of coarse natures was as nothing to this moral depravity. He suffered acutely, and confessed to himself that

his last illusion had vanished about the softened manners and civilisation of our time.

The thought of his sister's gentle love was his sole support. "Mon Dieu! que j'ai besoin de penser à toi!" he wrote to her in those terrible days of July.

His heart was filled with pity for "these poor fools, who are shedding their blood without so much as knowing what they want. Who could see such sights without mourning for the victims, even if they were the most guilty of men! . . . And guilty they are, no doubt, but not half so guilty in my eyes as those who have made Helots of them, who have systematically brutalised their human feelings, and to serve their own selfish interests have created a class of men who have no interest except in disorder and plunder.

.. How hard it is to live between two parties who condemn us to hate them both equally! Yet I do not despair : if I lived to see humanity shattered, and France expiring, I should still maintain that the destinies of humanity are divine, and that it is France who will lead the march for their accomplishment."

That was a courageous word, and it was spoken in the faith that moves mountains. Only once was the idea more perfectly expressed, and that was by Italy's great poet of liberty, Carducci

Renan the critic, the rationalist, the freethinker, the future author of the Vie de Jésus,' which must have made his orthodox friend M. Reinaud shiver violently if he ever had courage to read it-this Renan was a man of the strongest faith.

"We are on the side of all believers," he said. "The frivolous, the sceptical man is the only atheist."

But he defined and distinguished his beliefs with scrupulous attention to the teaching of history. Anything vague or windy was contemptible in his sight, and especially the mischievous rhetoric that darkens counsel in revolutionary times. He was not so superficial as to put any faith in a political change of system.

"It is not a political but a moral and religious revolution that is wanted," he said.

Indeed the constitution of the National Assembly was not calculated to encourage the hopes of the judicious. "An assembly of pure nonentities," he called it, "of light feeble minds, with no understanding of business; young men, each thinking himself alone capable of regenerating his country. They cannot agree on the simplest matters. We must wait.'

liberty of the Press to conquer the world."

When people babbled to him about happiness for all, he said calmly that "happiness was not the ideal end of humanity, but perfection."

Where, then, did he place his faith?

"I think," he said, "that our country must go through a period of overthrow before it can reach a stable form. All the same, the acceleration of the humanitarian movement, and the admirable sense of logic in the French people, makes me hope that we shall yet see that new society, which I doubt not will be more advanced than the one which has just passed away. But to reach it we must pass through some very hard times."

He had apparently the same satisfaction in his countrymen's instinct for logic as the Briton has in his countrymen's instinct for compromise. "Be reasonable!" says the Frenchman ere he proceeds to some suicidal extreme. "Be sensible!" says the Briton when from pure caution he is preparing for himself some horrible future risk.

But to each his own way, on his own day. And God help us all with the consequences !

In one year Ernest seemed to grow from a brilliant young student of philosophy into a mature and thoughtful man. It was a year of pain and stress, and all the sorrowful scenes he had witnessed left their mark on his spirit. The

love of knowledge had no way decreased in him, but he would no longer have thought his own intellectual development the principal aim of life, as he had once done. Yet he had not been really self-centred, in the incurable sense, only concentrated on his studies. His mind was flexible, sympathetic, alert, so that he was never out of touch with the minds about him. Like all imaginative people he suffered, and envied at moments the tough-fibred consciousness that could pass unhurt through the accumulated anguish of Paris in 1848. He was never deceived about the populace. In that month of April he said, "They are to all appearance calm and quiet. But the enthusiasm of the people of Paris is beyond description. It is a delirium that nothing could resist."

On 1st July 1848 he sent a letter to his sister, very long, very sad, and extraordinarily penetrating, a letter which it would be impossible to forget, in which the feeling is as intense as the expression of it is restrained.

He begins, "The storm is past, ma chère amie, but Paris is no longer recognisable." The destruction which lay all around seemed to him far less deplorable than the spirit which survived the destruction, especially on the conquering side.

"Something hard, ferocious, and inhuman seems to have entered both manners and language. . . . The streets were strange scenes of ruin, but the

Place de la Bastille was by far the strangest, with its trees twisted and torn, its houses burnt and demolished, and the wildly improvised barricades made of upturned carriages and paving-stones; in the middle of it all the people, half-stunned and half-giddy with their terrifying experiences, soldiers sleeping exhausted on the pavement almost under their feet, the rage of the vanquished betraying itself under their affected quietness; here and there members of the pitiful public begging alms for the disabled, and linen to bandage their wounds-all combined into a spectacle of almost sublime confusion, but with the note of human woe in every tone sounding from men face to face with each other and their naked primitive instincts. The voice of human nature sounds never so clearly as in such moments, for all the rest of life is wrapped in a veil of artificiality."

So Ernest wrote, and in the fervour of his own own deeplystirred feelings he confided to the sister he trusted his inward convictions and most secret hopes.

first sheath, not till it has become a social dogma, that it develops into a universally recognised and applied truth.

"What can be more systematic than the policy of the Social Contract? And yet the whole constitutional régime is nothing but this same policy, drawing on towards a system. The same thing will happen with Socialism. At present it is narrow, inapplicable, purely Utopian, true on one side, false on the other; true in its principles, false in its forms. The day is not far distant when it will become an evident and recognised law, freed from exaggerations and chimeras. Who will have triumphed then? Will it be the partisans who sustained the false along with the true, and wanted to realise the impossible? Will it be the adversaries who denied the true on account of the false, and wanted to suppress the evolution of the new form? Neither the one nor the other it will be humanity that has taken one step farther, and won to a form more advanced and right. . . . These are my principles, chère amie. I think it is time to destroy the exclusive reign of capital, and to associate labour with it, but I also think that no means for the application of this idea have yet been found, that no system will furnish them, and that they will come forth in their completeness only from the force of things. All this is certainly far enough away from the Mountain and the

Terror.

It is this faith in humanity, this devotion to its perfecting, and thereby to its happiness, that I call the new religion. It is at the spectacle of this solemn and holy apparition that I desired to see you present."

What could be finer, what

more persuasive than this? But Henriette could not admire, would not be persuaded, and had not the least desire to be present. The whole thing to her was cruel unmitigated tragedy. The accounts she read in Poland of Paris, and the fate of Parisians slain by fusillades in their own streets, reduced her to hopelessness. She could not comprehend the hopes of Ernest, or his faith in the future, which to her seemed black as night. In vain he argued that she was too far away to judge rightly, that the newspapers she read were full of wild inventions, and some especially bitter and vindictive towards the insurgents, of whom he had many good things to say. Henriette's reply to this was that her distance from the scene enabled her to take a more comprehensive view resembling the view of posterity; and moreover, she was able to hear the comments of other nations, the pity felt by the friends of France, the open rejoicing of her enemies.