THE REASON OF MADNESS. 
255 
The horror of brilliant and polished surfaces which character- 
izes madness, is the horror of luxury and of riches whose insolent 
display redoubles the tortures of the famished poor 1 Madness is 
the most frightful malady which can afflict the human species ; 
for it changes man into a brute, and destroys him in atrocious 
convulsions, without even taking from him the consciousness of 
his desperate condition. This means that the selfish society which 
allows one of its members to perish with hunger, is a criminal and 
accursed society, and that God proportions the greatness of the 
punishment to the greatness of the crime. Misery and oppression 
also change the oppressed into brutes, give them the taste for 
blood and murder, and sharpen their teeth to tear out the hearts 
of the rich. 
Ireland ! Ireland I with its six millions of starvelings, do you 
know what evil possesses it ? It is madness, real madness, the 
evil without cure, the mortal contagion. O woe to thee, Albion ! 
woe to all the executioners of Erin ! for over thee, Albion ; over 
thee and thy lords impend the vengeance and the hatred of the 
desperate sons of Erin . . . those men whom thy insatiable cu- 
pidity and thy pride have transformed into wolves, and into mad- 
dened wolves ! 
A prefect of police, bound to have the best statistics on this 
subject, has fixed at forty thousand the number of malefactors 
which the city of Paris alone contains within its walls. Since M. 
Gisquet has published these revelations, has this number of forty 
thousand rebels, incessantly conspiring against your social order, 
increased or diminished ? It has augmented, and augmented in 
spite of the increased force of municipal officers, and to so large 
an amount that it has been necessary to enlarge the halls of the 
court of assizes of the Seine to make room for all the bandits 
which their scavengers of the police daily pick up on the pave- 
ment of Paris. And the judges of the capital have not sufficed 
to judge the offenders, whose innumerable bands succeed each 
other on the criminaFs bench. And the evil has risen to such a 
height that the proudest admirer of your pretended social order 
would not dare now to trust himself to leave his dwelling late at 
night without arms, or an escort. And the legislators of this 
