THE rat; the RUSSIAN AND THE NORMAN. 149 
The rat of Montfau^on has lately caused sessions of the Munici- 
pal Council of that suburb. On this terrible question it was de- 
cided that the best way to get rid of the rats was to kill them, 
which did not advance matters much, seeing that they failed to 
devise the methods of operation. It is a question, however, not 
to be longer postponed. For the quarters of the East of Paris it 
is, “To be, or not to be.” Reflect a little on this curious coinci- 
dence : the two fiercest and bloodiest varieties of the rat, which 
have levied the heaviest tribute on the European world, have 
come to us precisely from the same places, and at the same times, 
as the two nations which have longest remained barbarous, the 
Russian and the English, still devoted to the principle of war 
and of spoliation. 
The rat — emblem of misery, murder, and rapine — emblem of 
the Norman or Muscovite horde — can only disappear from the 
soil after misery and murder shall first have been banished, and’ 
wise governments shall have put into practice the pacific theory 
which we placed in the mouth of Marshal Bugeaud, the conqueror 
of Isly, in this toast given at the Phalansterian Banquet of Apiil, 
1840: “To the abolition of war! To the transformation of de- 
structive armies into productive armies 1” 
I have developed too largely the subject of the Mole and the 
Rat to have time to pause on the Desman of the Pyrenees, and on 
the family of Shrew mice. This tribe, comprising three species, 
one of which is aquatic, is ambiguous between the rat and the 
mole, and the morals of the shrew mouse resemble those of these 
two nearest species. They devour each other, and there is war 
to the death between the mouse and the shrew mouse. The bite 
of the latter is venomous. Many dogs refuse to attack it, while 
they tear up the mole with ardor. The shrew mouse symbolizes 
the passage from the first industrial period to that of barbarism. 
The Desman is a species of amphibious mole whose snout is almost 
a trunk, and is met with only among the streams of the Pyrenees. 
It burrows in the banks below the level of the waters, and lives 
on aquatic insects, and on small fishes : it may symbolize the poorer 
class of river poachers. 
