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improvisation of duty, which never loses heart. They had no
printing-offices, they obtained them; they had no guns, they found them;
they had no balls, they cast them; they had no powder, they manufactured
it; they had nothing but paving-stones, and from thence they evolved
combatants.
It is true that these paving-stones were the paving-stones of Paris,
stones which change themselves into men.
Such is the power of Right, that, during four days these hundred and
twenty men, who had nothing in their favor but the goodness of their
cause, counterbalanced an army of 100,000 soldiers. At one moment the
scale turned on their side. Thanks to them, thanks to their resistance,
seconded by the indignation of honest hearts, there came an hour when
the victory of the law seemed possible, and even certain. On Thursday,
the 4th, the coup d'état tottered, and was obliged to support itself
by assassination. We seen that without the butchery of the boulevards,
if he had not saved his perjury by a massacre, if he had not sheltered
his crime by another crime, Louis Bonaparte was lost.
During the long hours of this struggle, a struggle without a truce, a
struggle against the army during the day and against the police during
the night,--an unequal struggle, where all the strength and all the rage
was on one side, and, as we have just said, nothing but Right on the
other, not one of these hundred and twenty Representatives, not a single
one failed at the call of duty, not one shunned the danger, not one drew
back, not one wearied,--all these heads placed themselves resolutely
under the axe, and for four days waited for it to fall.
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