It was the passion for Equality that made the Second Empire possible. The city _proletariat_ would endure anything but a privilege of class, a constitutional monarchy associated in their experience with an artificial peerage and a narrow uniform franchise; the _bourgeoisie_, terrified by socialism--that is, confiscation--would accept any Government strong enough to put and keep down the Reds, the Anarchists, who under the Republic had kept Paris always within a week--had brought her more than once within twenty-four hours--of sack and pillage. The peasantry hated privilege and Socialism with an equal and impartial hatred. The First Empire had given them much of what they most prized in their actual condition, and was credited with all. Its one hateful association was incessant and at last disastrous war, anticipated conscriptions, and foreign invasion. The Second Empire, with its promise of peace, was the embodiment of their ideal. It promised work to the operative, opportunities of fortune to the restless, and safe investment to the prudent among the middle-class. Its protectorate of the Pope secured the clergy and the women; and it mattered nothing that, crushing under foot the freedom at once of the press and the tribune, it incurred the bitter hatred of the intellectual classes in a country where pure intellect is more ambitious and more immediately powerful than in any other. It stood firm and unshaken while it kept its promise of peace and prosperity--the firmer that it embodied so distinctly the errors and illusions of the many, and not the less popular that it showed so profound and cynical a contempt for the intelligence of the few. Its Budgets alone would have been fatal to a Government resting on and responsible to Opinion, for the rapid growth of the Debt in a time of peace and plenty would have terrified men accustomed to sift the 'capital' and 'revenue' accounts of great Companies, and to calculate the resources of Empires as a peasant the yield of his farm. But the millions were content; the worse the credit of the State, the higher the interest on their savings; the embellishment of Paris and other great public works were a practical acknowledgement of the _droit au travail_; and the calculations of those, who criticised the fearful waste (_coulage_) of such a system, proved to demonstration that a spendthrift State must come to the end of a spendthrift _rentier_--with what consequences the Commune of 1871 bare witness--found no attention; spoke in a tongue not understood by the people. The masses were not even alarmed by the warnings of veteran statesmen, consummate financiers, and _doctrinaires_ of every school. Only in those great crises when all that is left to wisdom is a choice of calamities, as in 1848 and 1871, does Demos abdicate; recognize for a moment that all men are not born, much less trained to remain, free _and equal_, and entreat the pilots by hereditary profession to see the ship of State through the breakers.