But
the reasoning of M. Anatole France is never confused. His reasoning is
clear and informed by a profound erudition. Such is not the case of
Crainquebille, a street hawker, charged with insulting the constituted
power of society in the person of a policeman. The charge is not true,
nothing was further from his thoughts; but, amazed by the novelty of his
position, he does not reflect that the Cross on the wall perpetuates the
memory of a sentence which for nineteen hundred years all the Christian
peoples have looked upon as a grave miscarriage of justice. He might
well have challenged the President to pronounce any sort of sentence, if
it were merely to forty-eight hours of simple imprisonment, in the name
of the Crucified Redeemer.
He might have done so. But Crainquebille, who has lived pushing every
day for half a century his hand-barrow loaded with vegetables through the
streets of Paris, has not a philosophic mind. Truth to say he has
nothing. He is one of the disinherited. Properly speaking, he has no
existence at all, or, to be strictly truthful, he had no existence till
M. Anatole France's philosophic mind and human sympathy have called him
up from his nothingness for our pleasure, and, as the title-page of the
book has it, no doubt for our profit also.
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