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Still worse than the masses of slaves were those who had been de jure or simply de facto released from slavery a mixture of mendicant rabble and very rich parvenus, no longer slaves and not yet fully burgesses, economically and even legally dependent on their master and yet with the pretensions of free men; and these freedmen made their way above all towards the capital, where gain of various sorts was to be had and the retail traffic as well as the minor handicrafts were almost wholly in their hands.
The street rabble of Charleston could any night clamber over the thinly defended walls, and at least a score of companies of minute men, drilled and equipped, could be brought by rail from the interior of the State to garrison and hold it. But what then?
There should have been more distinction made between me and the rabble. I have said that he told me little that was new. In one matter, however, he did open my eyes. He introduced me to an aspect of myself entirely unsuspected. "They," he said-meaning me, "have unusual business capacity, and are destined to be leaders in great commerical enterprises."
Agricultural entrenchments had long made the country almost impregnable, while its defences against the ocean rendered almost as good service against a more implacable human foe. Aremberg, leading his soldiers along the narrow causeway, in hot pursuit of what they considered a rabble rout of fugitive beggars, soon reached Winschoten. Here he became aware of the presence of his despicable foe.
"You are all like that. You regard yourself as one of the rabble, if it comes to that! Yes, you do! Only you don't know it! That's the slave-nature in you; the higher classes of society regard you as such and you involuntarily do the same. Yes, you may pull faces, but it's true, all the same! You don't like to hear about your own kind, for you don't believe they can amount to anything!
The "young scholar," as De Beauvoir had designated him, had no power to infuse his own spirit into his rabble rout of followers. They were already panic-struck by the unexpected appearance of the enemy. The Catholics came on with the coolness of veterans, taking as deliberate aim as if it had been they, not their enemies, who were behind breastworks.
He told him that, on his arrival in Dresden, he had neither been imprisoned nor handed over to a guard, also that his lawsuit was progressing exactly as he wished, and, as a warning for the rabble who had gathered around Nagelschmidt, he gave him over to the full vengeance of the law for the outrages which he had committed in the Ore Mountains after the publication of the amnesty.
"Convulsively they swear, Still writhe the rabble rout, Engaged with anxious care In pumping Lethe out." Ye Christians, good and meek, This vision bear in mind; If journalists ye seek, Attempt their thumbs to find. Defects they often hide, As folks whose hairs are gone We see with wigs supplied Probatum! I have done!
The Taepings succeeded in blowing in one of the gates, the townspeople fraternized with the assailants, and the very Manchus who had defied Sir Hugh Gough in 1842 surrendered their lives and their honor to a force which was nothing more than an armed rabble.
Altogether, what a time of disillusionment this was to the young officer. What depths of cruelty and obscenity it revealed in the Parisian rabble. What folly to treat them with the Christian forbearance shown by Louis XVI. How much more suitable was grapeshot than the beatitudes. The lesson was stored up for future use at a somewhat similar crisis on this very spot.
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