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The Past, Present, and Future of the Republic
The Past Present and Future of the Republic Author:Alphonse de Lamartine Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. OF HOME AFFAIRS. OF THE PRINCIPAL PARTIES IN FRANCE, AND THE DANGERS THEY MAY CREATE FOR THE COUNTRY. We have spoken of the Socialist party; w... more »e have shown that the existence of that party was to be deplored, but not in the least to be feared. It retards the resumption of labor and the investment of capital upon the soil, and in other branches of industry, and is an evil, especially for the people, who live by labor, and absorb capital in the shape of wages, to return it again to the capitalist in the shape of products—as the sand of Egypt absorbs the waters of the Nile at their overflow, to return them again in the shape of harvests. But the public imagination, reassured as to the radical impotence of the Socialists, will soon regain its elasticity; security, and the necessity of interest and of enjoyment, will produce a reflux of capital, now alarmed and inactive; and with this labor and comfort will reappear among the people. It is an affair of days and months: time will perform the cure. We have also seen that the terrorist party equally exists " in the nation, because tyranny, furious ambition, violence, and crime unhappily always form a depraved part of human nature. We have demonstrated that this party of violence and crime, which has revealed itself by various disorderly assaults upon the Constituent Assembly, by the abortive attempt at the red flag, on April 16, May 15, and June 23, and by certain sanguinary vociferations, condemned in the clubs where they were offered, is such an absurdity under the Republic of 1848, that unanimous France would rise against it, and it would be strangled by its own first drop of blood. France, whether republican or not republican, has no desjre to see or to suffer the use of the guillotine in order to perform a fan...« less