PANIC AND MASSACRE.

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should have saved the barber and the white-headed gentle-man also. Without a weapon even I felt confident of takingone from the bewildered Swiss assassins at a single grasp-The best of the catastrophe was, that more Frenchmen thanany others were wounded or beaten on this occasion. Panicfear is blind, and deaf and feeble as an infant. Two hun-dred men with any of their senses about them might havemade a sweep of all the three thousand assembled on thatoccasion. Such is panic fear ; and sure enough the ancientswere quite right in attributing its origin to some super-natural inspiration of a demon—so causeless, blind, unrea-sonable it is. Such also is the “ panic’-' which oftentimesseizes on the commercial world. All commercial businessis conducted through the instrumentality of bills, or paperpromissory notes. A. takes B.’s paper, C. takes D.’s, &c.,and vice versa. Now all on a sudden all these paper gen-tlemen take it into their heads to have no more to do withpaper, which is as much the circulating medium of thecommercial world as gold, silver, and copper are of thedealers in the necessaries of life. The value of gold andsilver is only conventional; so if the butcher and the bakerwere like the merchants, to quarrel with their circulating'representative equivalents, we might as surely starve oneanother as the merchants, bankers, &c., do make eachother bankrupts, unless we could manage to get a meal bychanging chairs, and tables, and clothing for the food. The“ panics” in the commercial world might be very well illus-trated by a picture of some thousand wiseacres furiously atwork in knocking their skulls one against the other. Somestand it; others—the weakest—fall. Afterwards they mayask each other, what they have been doing all that foriBut to return to Palmieri : he was instantly stabbed inthe back by the executioner, and then hung up when somedegree of quiet was restored.