It is the very worst course that could be adopted. The proper cure for the mania for demonstrations is not the sword, but a little cold water.
Try how many followers you will get for a standard of revolt raised with the cry:
"The people are being syringed?"
Ah! where is the Government that will have first the strength, and then the good sense, to leave the people alone, instead of doing its best to irritate them into adopting the rôle of martyr? Monarchy or Republic, what matters the name of this Government, so that it gives us what we are in search of—our liberty.
The English newspapers love to fill their columns with the sayings and doings of French Anarchists, so as to try and prove to their readers that France "is still navigating on a volcano," although they know very well that our revolutionary mountains are incapable of bringing forth even a mouse, as the ridiculous failure of the proposed Anarchist demonstration at Victor Hugo's funeral proved. The English know perfectly well that in the year 1867, thanks to the inopportune meddling of the police, there was a riot, in Hyde Park, which was likely to have proved very serious. The English know all this; but the pot always had a trick of calling the kettle black.
Our lower orders are a thousand times more intelligent than the English ones; and when the French police force cease to be the symbol, the instrument, of an arbitrary power, in order to become, in some sort, the protection of the people, our workmen will astonish the world with their good behavior, as they did on the day of our immortal poet's apotheosis.
The Frenchman is impressionable, excitable; but he is gentle, and easy to govern. The Parisians never raised any riots that could not be traced to the want of tact, or the malice, of the Government; and we all know that if M. Thiers had not been so bent upon putting down a small revolution, he would not have stirred up a large one; the Commune would have been nipped in the bud at the Buttes-Chaumont on the 18th of May, 1871. The harmless folk who were looking after the famous cannons would have been only too pleased to go home.
A nation does not learn the proper use of freedom in a day. It does not understand at first sight that obedience and respect for the law are two virtues indispensable to everyone who wishes to get on tolerably under a democracy; it is for the Government to teach it its lesson. To do this properly, an authority is wanted which shall be vigilant, while making itself felt as little as possible.
This liberty should be the monopoly of no one, but the privilege of each and all. Every time our police officers pounce upon a red flag and tear it up, every time they suppress a Catholic school, or force open the doors of a convent, the fruits of many a month's lessons are lost. We go back; but the cause of the white or red flag is advanced.
Why is Roman Catholicism perfectly powerless in England, politically speaking?