François Coppée [pp. 196-205]

FRANCOIS CoPPSE.
Moreover, children in charitable institutions are exposed from
their agglomeration to certain diseases, greatest of which is
ophthalmia. There can be no doubt that if harboring day-schools
were established in New York, as the asiles have been in Paris,
the willing industrious poor would derive great benefit and assistance from them.
FRAN(OIS COPPICE.
IN one of his terse poetical works Boileau, the celebrated
French satirist of the seventeenth century, gives vent to the following sentiment:
"Le temps, qui change tout, change aussi nos humeurs"
-that is to say: "Time, which alters everything, alters also the
turn of our minds." This is undoubtedly true, but would it not
be equally appropriate to say the same thing of these powerful
modifiers of the human temper-luck, honors, and prosperity?
Ask the former friends and associates of a freshly-made Metropolitan roundsman it the blue galloon suddenly stitched on his
arms by Dame Fortune does not considerably alter his manners,
his very gait on what was once his own beat, his daily intercourse with his ex-comrades, and his views of old about clandestine calls upon the corner-saloon's much-abused hospitalities.
Ask the fierce demagogue of a few years ago, who all of a
sudden passed into the hitherto "odious ranks of the millionaires," what he now thinks of the once "sacred sweat of the
people," and observe how he will smile. Speak to him of the
undeniable right of the masses to rise in their might-as he
thunderingly used to preach it-to smother hated monopoly as
they would the suffocating fumes of an ill-burning petroleumlamp, and see how he will jump in his wrath and swear that all
the national and State guns should be pointed at once against
such despicable vermin, a mere gang of insatiable villains and
contemners of the holy rights of property and genius.
Ask the most radical of politicians, whom luck or talent has
carried up to the Himalayas of power, why he has so wonderfully turned out a conservative of the most approved pattern.
To such a question the once unmanageable Gambetta answered
to his formerly "admirable Bellevillois "-who so many times
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