The friend of the people who will write the history of Liberalism in France will save us many a convulsion. Sincere Liberalism would be folly in a country where the governing classes, refusing to concede anything, constrain every honest man to become a revolutionist. But it was never anything else than the Jesuitism of liberty, a trick of the bourgeoisie to isolate the workmen. From Bailly to Jules Favre, the moderantists have masked the manoeuvres of despotism, buried our revolutions, conducted the great massacres of proletarians. The old clear-sighted Parisian sections hated them more than the down right reactionists. Twice Imperial despotism rehabilitated them, and the small middle-class, soon forgetting their true part, accepted as defenders those who pretended to be vanquished like themselves. The men who had made abortive the movement of 1848 and paved the way for the 2nd December thus became during the darkness which followed it the acclaimed vindicators of ravished liberty. At the first dawn they appeared what they had ever been----the enemies of the working-class. Under the Empire the Left never condescended to concern itself with the interests of the workmen. These Liberals never found for them a word, a protestation, even such as the Chambers of 1830-1848 sometimes witnessed. The young lawyers whom they had affiliated to themselves soon revealed their designs, rallying to the Liberal Empire, some openly, like Ollivier and Darimon, others with prudence, like Picard. For the timid or ambitious they founded the "open Left," a bench of candidates for public office; and in 1870 a number of Liberals indeed solicited official functions. For the "intransigeants" there was the "closed Left," where the irreconcilable dragons Gambetta, Cremieux, Arago, Pelletan guarded the pure principles. The chiefs towered in the centre. These two groups of augurs thus held every fraction of bourgeois opposition--the timorous and the intrepid. After the plebiscite they became the holy synod, the uncontested chiefs of the small middle-class, more and more incapable of governing itself, and alarmed at the Socialist movement, behind which they showed it the hand of the Emperor. It gave them full powers, shut its eyes, and allowed itself to drift gradually towards the parliamentary Empire, big with portfolios for its patrons. The thunderbolt of the defeats galvanised it into life, but only for a moment. At the bidding of the deputies to keep quiet, the small middle-class, the mother of the 10th August, docilely bent its head and let the foreigner plunge his sword into the very bosom of France. Poor France! Who will save thee? The humble, the poor, those who for six years contended for thee with the Empire.