136 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
dence, and not having to fear the law which disdains it, it profits 
by the faculty of defensive repercussion, with which it is armed, 
to intimidate its adversaries, and to pursue the course of its dep- 
redations. This faculty of defensive repercussion, proper to sev- 
eral species, and especially to the monopolizers, is one of the most 
striking problems of passional analogy. Much has been written 
and discoursed upon the causes of the grandeur and decline of 
Napoleon Bonaparte, but certainly few suspect that the empire 
has perished from an effect of defensive repercussion, by a hedge- 
hog manoeuvre (coalition of stock-jobbers and of grain commis- 
sioners, who having cause of complaint against the procedures of 
the great chief toward them, excited in 1812 a factitious famine, 
which retarded the Russian expedition six weeks). Why also, 
when the emperor had guessed the weak point in the armor of 
commerce, and when he wished to deliver the world from para- 
sitical industry, by depriving it of the two monopolies of the bank 
and of transportation — why did he not execute this splendid de- 
sign ? Why ? — why ? Ah then, precisely because commerce 
is armed with the power of defensive repercussion, and no one 
knows by what part to lay hold of it. 
It is said that the hedgehog is the only quadruped of France 
on which the venom of the viper has not taken effect. I should 
have guessed this exception merely from analogy. I am only 
surprised that a sensible man should consider its invulnerability a 
merit in this ignoble beast. For explain, if you please, how cal- 
umny (the viper) can sting the literary blackguard, who lives be- 
low it and upon it. 
When, alas 1 will governments, which have under their eyes the 
example of Napoleon overthrown by a coalition of monopolizers ; 
when will legislators, who have under their eyes in their tribunal 
the image of Christ crucified by the Pharisees ; when will govern- 
ments and legislators, better advised, come to understand that all 
the miseries and all the sufferings of populations proceed from 
the insatiable rapacity of the commercial vulture, which inces- 
santly tears at the liver of the laborer . . . and that all the strug- 
gles, and all the revolutions which aim at thrones, have their cause 
in the exploitation of the laborer by the intermediary parasite. 
