I am not speaking to saints’ (uproar). If compared with contemporary French statesmen, and the practical choice is between him and them, the President will not seem what he appears when measured by the notions of a people who exact at least from inferior functionaries _a rigid decorum in the pettiest details of their private morals_. I have but one last point to make about this _coup d’état_, and then I will release you from my writing. I do not know whether you in England rightly realise the French Socialism. Take, for instance, M. Proudhon, who is perhaps their ideal and perfect type. He was _représentant de la Seine_ in the late Assembly, elected, which is not unimportant, after the publication of his books and on account of his opinions. In his ‘_Confessions d’un Révolutionnaire_,’ a very curious book—for he writes extremely well—after maintaining that our well-known but, as we imagine, advanced friends, Ledru Rollin, and Louis Blanc, and Barbès, and Blanqui are all _réactionnaires_, and clearly showing, to the grief of mankind, that once the legislator of the Luxembourg wished to preserve ‘equilibrium,’ and the author of the provincial circulars to maintain the ‘tranquillity,’ he gives the following _bonâ fide_ and amusing account of his own investigations:— ‘I commenced my task of solitary conspiracy by the study of the socialisms of antiquity, necessary, in my judgment, to determine the law, whether practical or theoretical, of progress. These socialisms I found in the Bible. A memoir on the institution of the Sabbath—considered with regard to morals, to health, and in its relation to the family and the city—procured for me a bronze medal from my academy. From the faith in which I had been reared, I had precipitated myself head-long, head-foremost, into pure reason, and already, what was wonderful and a good omen, when I made Moses a philosopher and a socialist, I was greeted with applause. If I am now in error, the fault is not merely mine. Was there ever a similar seduction? ‘But I studied, above all, with a view to action. I cared little for academical laurels. I had no leisure to become _savant_, still less a _littérateur_ or an archæologist. I began immediately upon political economy. ‘I had assumed as the rule of my investigations that every principle which, pushed to its consequences, should end in a contradiction, must be considered false and null; and that if this principle had been developed into an institution, the institution itself must be considered as factitious, as utopian.