vagabonds to be sent wandering again over space—­for a time.  ’During one such periodical clearance,’ says Lacretelle, ’in May, 1750, the Police had presumed withal to carry off some reputable people’s children, in the hope of extorting ransoms for them.  The mothers fill the public places with cries of despair; crowds gather, get excited:  so many women in destraction run about exaggerating the alarm:  an absurd and horrid fable arises among the people; it is said that the doctors have ordered a Great Person to take baths of young human blood for the restoration of his own, all spoiled by debaucheries.  Some of the rioters,’ adds Lacretelle, quite coolly, ‘were hanged on the following days:’  the Police went on. (Lacretelle, iii. 175.) O ye poor naked wretches! and this, then, is your inarticulate cry to Heaven, as of a dumb tortured animal, crying from uttermost depths of pain and debasement?  Do these azure skies, like a dead crystalline vault, only reverberate the echo of it on you?  Respond to it only by ’hanging on the following days?’—­Not so:  not forever!  Ye are heard in Heaven.  And the answer too will come,—­in a horror of great darkness, and shakings of the world, and a cup of trembling which all the nations shall drink.

Remark, meanwhile, how from amid the wrecks and dust of this universal Decay new Powers are fashioning themselves, adapted to the new time and its destinies.  Besides the old Noblesse, originally of Fighters, there is a new recognised Noblesse of Lawyers; whose gala-day and proud battle-day even now is.  An unrecognised Noblesse of Commerce; powerful enough, with money in its pocket.  Lastly, powerfulest of all, least recognised of all, a Noblesse of Literature; without steel on their thigh, without gold in their purse, but with the ’grand thaumaturgic faculty of Thought’ in their head.  French Philosophism has arisen; in which little word how much do we include!  Here, indeed, lies properly the cardinal symptom of the whole wide-spread malady.  Faith is gone out; Scepticism is come in.  Evil abounds and accumulates:  no man has Faith to withstand it, to amend it, to begin by amending himself; it must even go on accumulating.  While hollow langour and vacuity is the lot of the Upper, and want and stagnation of the Lower, and universal misery is very certain, what other thing is certain?  That a Lie cannot be believed!  Philosophism knows only this:  her other belief is mainly that, in spiritual supersensual matters no Belief is possible.  Unhappy!  Nay, as yet the Contradiction of a Lie is some kind of Belief; but the Lie with its Contradiction once swept away, what will remain?  The five unsatiated Senses will remain, the sixth insatiable Sense (of vanity); the whole daemonic nature of man will remain,—­hurled forth to rage blindly without rule or rein; savage itself, yet with all the tools and weapons of civilisation; a spectacle new in History.