The rich man of to-day was poor yesterday. He was the very artisan, the soldier, the peasant, whom he now avoids. He has the false notion, that people gain only by taking from others. He will not let his companions of yesterday ascend the ladder by which he has mounted, lest in the ascent he should lose something. He does not know that "every flood of rising people brings with it a flood of new wealth." He shuts himself up in his class, in his little circle of habits, closes the door, and carefully guards--a nonentity. To maintain his position, the rich man withdraws from the people--is insulated--and, therefore, in bondage. Here let us stop. What is it that we have seen? The peasant in fetters, the workman oppressed, the artisan crippled, the manufacturers embarrassed, the tradesman corrupted, the official in misery, the rich man exiled--all in bondage, all hating one another, and all constituting the life and marrow of the great and civilized country, to whose deplorable condition M. Michelet especially invites our attention. Deplorable, said we? Oh, far from it! The calamity that would crush any other nation, has a far different effect upon France. Bondage and hatred may exist, misery may eat like a canker-worm at the heart of the empire; but France, great, glorious, military, and beautiful, is consumed only to rise phoenix-like, fairer and younger, from her ashes. The French peasant may be in fetters, but he is also the nobleman of the world--the only nobleman remaining, "whilst Europe has continued plebeian." (!) "It is said the Revolution has suppressed the nobility, but it is just the reverse; it has made thirty-four millions of nobles. When an emigrant was boasting of the glory or his ancestors, a peasant, who had been successful in the field, replied, '_I am an ancestor_.'" "The strongest foundation that any nation has had since the Roman empire, is found in the peasantry of France." "It is by that that France is formidable to the world, and at the same time ready to aid it; it is this that the world looks upon with fear and hope. What, in fact, is it? The army of the future on the day the barbarians appear." If such is the picture of a peasantry in bondage, what must we expect from a peasantry at liberty? The workmen, as we have seen, are vicious enough, yet they are the most sociable and gentlest creatures in the universe. Nothing moves them to violence; if you starve them, they will wait; if you kill them, they are resigned; they are the least fortunate, but the most charitable; they know not what hatred is; the more you persecute, the more they love you. If in our haste we called these men degraded, we recall our words, for M. Michelet says that they stand amongst the highest "in the estimation of God." We told you just now, always upon the authority of our author, what rascals the French manufacturers were; and how the unfeeling masters of to-day are paying the penalty of their fathers' frauds and evil practices.