Public opinion stamps with no opprobrium a minister or favourite who profits by a job; and I fear you will find that jobbing pervades all your administrative departments.” “All very true,” said De Breze, with a shrug of the shoulders and in a tone of levity that seemed to ridicule the assertion he volunteered; “Virtue and Honour banished from courts and salons and the cabinet of authors ascend to fairer heights in the attics of ouvriers.” “The ouvriers, ouvriers of Paris!” cried this terrible German. “Ay, Monsieur le Comte, what can you say against our ouvriers? A German count cannot condescend to learn anything about ces petites gens.” “Monsieur,” replied the German, “in the eyes of a statesman there are no petites gens, and in those of a philosopher no petites choses. We in Germany have too many difficult problems affecting our working classes to solve, not to have induced me to glean all the information I can as to the ouvriers of Paris. They have among them men of aspirations as noble as can animate the souls of philosophers and poets, perhaps not the less noble because common-sense and experience cannot follow their flight; but as a body the ouvriers of Paris have not been elevated in political morality by the benevolent aim of the Emperor to find them ample work and good wages independent of the natural laws that regulate the markets of labour. Accustomed thus to consider the State bound to maintain them, the moment the State fails in that impossible task, they will accommodate their honesty to a rush upon property under the name of social reform. “Have you not noticed how largely increased within the last few years is the number of those who cry out, ‘La Propriete, cest le vol’? Have you considered the rapid growth of the International Association? I do not say that for all these evils--the Empire is exclusively responsible. To a certain degree they are found in all rich communities, especially where democracy is more or less in the ascendant. To a certain extent they exist in the large towns of Germany; they are conspicuously increasing in England; they are acknowledged to be dangerous in the United States of America; they are, I am told on good authority, making themselves visible with the spread of civilization in Russia. But under the French Empire they have become glaringly rampant, and I venture to predict that the day is not far off when the rot at work throughout all layers and strata of French society will insure a fall of the fabric at the sound of which the world will ring. “There is many a fair and stately tree which continues to throw out its leaves and rear its crest till suddenly the wind smites it, and then, and not till then, the trunk which seems so solid is found to be but the rind to a mass of crumbled powder.”