disappointment at the result of their own manœuvres, by which they had been caught in their own toils, they seized upon the pretext of sympathy in the sorrows of another country; and, aided by the treachery of certain of their own party in authority, invaded the obnoxious Assembly, overthrew the government for an hour, and proclaimed a terrorist government of their own. Foiled again in this audacious attempt, _foiled at least for the time being_, they now endeavoured to patch up the shaking soil that has given way beneath their feet, and plunged their leaders into a quagmire, and to build new foundations for fresh aggressions upon the discontent of a part of the working-classes. For this purpose they have taken two newfangled tools into their hands, the one of impulsion, the other of repulsion--the one of enthusiasm, the other of alarm; and both are so vaguely fashioned, and of so unintelligible a nature, that the real fact of their existence can never be proved, although their use, their purpose, and their design, in the hands of these men, are very clear. The one of these tools is a bugbear, a phantom, a bogie, to which they endeavour to give as terrific an aspect as possible, in order to fright ignorant men over into their own ranks. This evil spirit, they declare, has an existence, although no one ever saw it, no one ever felt it, no one ever knew where it dwells. No superstitious people was ever endeavoured to be worked up into a more irrefragable belief of some mysterious demon that haunts them in dark woods and obscure places to devour them--nor, generally, with more complete success over the credulous; for fear is the most powerful agent over the minds of the masses, and more especially when the fear is of the unknown and mysterious: and certainly no demon was ever described with a more hideous or blacker face. This bogie, phantom, bugbear, is a supposed influence called "Reaction." No precise form is given to it, for that would be to deprive it of more than half its terrors. No! _onme ignotum pro terribili_ is the policy. Nothing can be more vague or indefinite than this same monster, Reaction; it remains an Ossianic cloudlike spectre, floating no one knows whence, but bringing death and pestilence in its train. If the working-classes suffer, it is the Reaction, they are told, that is the cause of all their sufferings. If all their exactions, however exorbitant and impossible, _are not conceded at once_, it is because that horrible Reaction labours that their just demands should be withheld. If the most violent of their own body are not elected as the true representatives of the people, it is because that pestilential Reaction has cast a spell over the minds of all the electors. The Reaction has also, potent demon although it be, all the freaks and caprices of a lesser imp; it performs the strangest and most incomprehensible feats,--for if a discontented mass of workmen revolt unsuccessfully, and gain