fight for the defence of rights of the citizen, sacrificed too long to those of one man" (Action, Dec. 12, 1904). Finally, a law of amnesty was voted declaring that no one wanted to hear anything more of these trifles.
There was some opposition in the provinces,[1] but was it very serious? I am inclined to think not, when I read the documents published by Peguy in the ninth number of the sixth series of his Cahiers de la quinzaine. Several people, accustomed to speaking a verbose, sonorous, and nonsensical language, doubtless found themselves a little uncomfortable under the smiles of the leading grocers and eminent chemists who constituted the élite of the learned and musical societies before which they had been accustomed to hold forth on Justice, Truth, and Light. They found it necessary to adopt a stoical attitude.
Could anything be finer than this passage from a letter of Professor Bougie, an eminent doctor of social science, which I find on page 13: "I am very happy to learn that at last the League is going to speak. Its silence astonishes and frightens us." He must be a man who is easily astonished and frightened! Francis de Pressensé also suffered some anxiety of mind—he is a specialist in that kind of thing—but his feelings were of a very distinguished kind, as is only proper for an aristocratic Socialist; he was afraid that democracy was threatened with a new guillotine sèche.[2] resembling that which had done so much harm to virtuous democrats during the Panama scandal.[3] When he saw that the public quietly accepted
- ↑ The people in the provinces are not, as a matter of fact, so accustomed as the Parisians are to indulgence towards non-violent trickery and brigandage.
- ↑ ["Dry guillotine," popular expression meaning persecution—Trans.]
- ↑ Cahiers de la quinzaine 9th of the VIth series, p. 9. F. de Pressensè was at the time of the Panama affair Hébrard's principal clerk; we know that the latter was one of the principal beneficiaries from the Panama booty, but that has not injured his position in the eyes of the austere Huguenots; the Temps continues to be the organ of moderate democracy and of the ministers of the Gospel.
