boarding-house, where he puts a sou in the charity plate as a forfeit for every word of English spoken, or runs around in the Rue Neuve de Petit Champs, and consoles his patriotism by fish-balls and buckwheat cakes, or lets some kind, shrewd old woman buy and cook his chop, piously pilfering regularly her two sous a pound, there is no need to go hungry in Paris. Alas, that so much can not be said for the poorer classes of Parisians themselves, the laborers under whose lack of bread wrongs long suffered have so often ripened to revolutions. Let no one suppose the stimulating coffee, daintily prepared, is the drink of the laboring man of France. Happy is he who gets it once a week, and the common food on which the laborer works is soup, in which the meat is ordinarily scant enough, and the bread,—of which he can not always take as much as he would like and leave a portion of the loaf for the little ones at home;—a piece of bread with a bit of sausage, when he can afford it, makes the meal that marks the noonday pause in labor, and gives the more fortunate his _dejeuner a la fourchette_. In no city in the world is there more destitution than in Paris among the unfortunate and the deserving poor. The surface of its social life is kept so whitened that one forgets that it is like the sepulcher of Holy Writ. Only now and then, on some grand holiday, when misery may seem only a farce, only a fantastic spectacle in a pageant, is squalor’s want and beggary allowed to see the light. At all other times, the beggar’s hand must hold something to sell, and the reality of want be treated as if it were sham, and crime be made to feel ashamed of nothing but the day. With the slow-coming change in public opinion, on all questions of philanthropy and morals, with the slow-coming emancipation of education, with the slow-coming freedom from priestcraft and the growth of true religious sentiment in France, there must dawn a brighter day for the masses, those enormous majorities who make the under strata of the nation’s life. That it is volcanic strata, with a heart of fire that now and then heaves with its gigantic throbs the upper world, and sends forth the low rumble of suppressed lava-floods and the dull smoke of threatening revolution, is no marvel to any student of the past history and present social and moral and political conditions of France.