A Scrap Of Curious History

Marion City, on the Mississippi River, in the State of
Missouri--a village; time, 1845. La Bourboule-les-Bains, France
--a village; time, the end of June, 1894. I was in the one
village in that early time; I am in the other now. These times
and places are sufficiently wide apart, yet today I have the
strange sense of being thrust back into that Missourian village
and of reliving certain stirring days that I lived there so long
ago.

Last Saturday night the life of the President of the French
Republic was taken by an Italian assassin. Last night a mob
surrounded our hotel, shouting, howling, singing the
"Marseillaise," and pelting our windows with sticks and stones;
for we have Italian waiters, and the mob demanded that they be
turned out of the house instantly--to be drubbed, and then driven
out of the village. Everybody in the hotel remained up until far
into the night, and experienced the several kinds of terror which
one reads about in books which tell of nigh attacks by Italians
and by French mobs: the growing roar of the oncoming crowd; the
arrival, with rain of stones and a crash of glass; the withdrawal
to rearrange plans--followed by a silence ominous, threatening,
and harder to bear than even the active siege and the noise. The
landlord and the two village policemen stood their ground, and at
last the mob was persuaded to go away and leave our Italians in
peace. Today four of the ringleaders have been sentenced to
heavy punishment of a public sort--and are become local heroes,
by consequence.

That is the very mistake which was at first made in the
Missourian village half a century ago. The mistake was repeated
and repeated--just as France is doing in these later months.

In our village we had our Ravochals, our Henrys, our
Vaillants; and in a humble way our Cesario--I hope I have spelled
this name wrong. Fifty years ago we passed through, in all
essentials, what France has been passing through during the past
two or three years, in the matter of periodical frights, horrors,
and shudderings.

In several details the parallels are quaintly exact. In
that day, for a man to speak out openly and proclaim himself an
enemy of negro slavery was simply to proclaim himself a madman.
For he was blaspheming against the holiest thing known to a
Missourian, and could NOT be in his right mind. For a man to
proclaim himself an anarchist in France, three years ago, was to
proclaim himself a madman--he could not be in his right mind.

Now the original first blasphemer against any institution
profoundly venerated by a community is quite sure to be in
earnest; his followers and imitators may be humbugs and self-
seekers, but he himself is sincere--his heart is