I. The German paper called Die Weltwoche says that a new wave of unrest has risen across France, that the police have arrested many who had gone out into the streets, and that Emmanuel Macron has ringed his palace with armoured vehicles. One source says this, with no number and no name of any unit. Politico Europe reports burning rubbish bins, shop windows boarded up, and in the streets a mixture of yellow vests, anarchists and young men from the suburbs; a mixture it calls confused. Believe no more than is written.

II. Where did it begin? With schoolchildren, as Politico Europe reports; then, as the price of fuel and power rose, it flared into something fiercer. It adds that the public debt is so great that it leaves the magistrates no room to act, and that the middle parties are falling apart. Eight days ago this same ruler, as earlier reports told, admitted that his intelligence services had neither foreseen nor guarded against it. That is the cause. The vehicles at the gate are not the cause; they are the outcome.

III. What is an armoured vehicle? Iron on wheels, and a man inside. What is a palace? Stones piled up, which some men built and others will live in. What is the purple? Wool dyed in the blood of a shellfish. To guard these stones, iron is set before the threshold. Ask yourself: whom does this iron protect? Not the city, not the poor man's shop, but the threshold of one house.

IV. Remember your father Antoninus. He cut his own expenses first, he did not shut his door, he heard citizens without fear; and so he feared no one. Remember yourself too: when plague and war had drained the treasury, you sold the furnishings of the Palatine at auction rather than impose a new tax. Where debt takes away room to act, a ruler empties his own house for the city; he does not fortify it against the city.

V. Ὅρα μὴ ἀποκαισαρωθῇς, μὴ βαφῇς· γίνεται γάρ. Take care you are not made a Caesar, not dyed with that dye; it happens. The man who looks at citizens through the slits of armour is already dyed. He sees no enemies, only his own fear. This can happen to you as well, if you sit long in camp and listen only to your spies.

VI. The young men who throw fire do it because they are ignorant of good and evil. And you? Do you always know? Be gentle with those who err; but gentleness is not licence. The man who burns another man's shop must be restrained by law, for the shopkeeper whose window is boarded up has no armoured vehicle. Patience without discipline is sloth.

VII. Marine Le Pen, Politico Europe says, presents herself shrewdly as the leader of order while the centre falls apart. Consider the age of Vespasian: riots, the price of grain, candidates promising order, anxious rulers. All gone; no one holds their names. Order is not promised but delivered, daily, in small things.

VIII. What, then, is to be done? Cut your own expenses first, then other men's. See to the annona of fuel and power. Restrain the arsonists by trial; hear the hungry. Do not hope for Plato's republic; it is enough to have moved a little forward. And take the iron from the threshold: a ruler's defence is not iron but the trust of his citizens; and the man who has lost that armours his wheels in vain.