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death or exile, no one knows which, in this worse than Venetian mystery of police, and their maidens flogged to death in the market-place, and who share the same fate if they presume to ask the reason why.
“It is unfortunate,” says Jefferson, “that the efforts of mankind to secure the freedom of which they have been deprived, should be accompanied with violence and even with crime.
But while we weep over the means, we must pray for the end.”
Pray fearlessly for such ends; there is no risk!
“Men are all tories by nature,” says Arnold, “when tolerably well off; only monstrous injustice and atrocious cruelty can rouse them.”
Some talk of the rashness of the uneducated classes.
Alas! ignorance is far oftener obstinate than rash.
Against one French Revolution — that scarecrow of the ages — weigh Asia, “carved in stone,” and a thousand years of Europe, with her half-dozen nations meted out and trodden down to be the dull and contented footstools of priests and kings.
The customs of a thousand years ago are the sheet-anchor of the passing generation, so deeply buried, so fixed, that the most violent efforts of the maddest fanatic can drag it but a hand's-breadth.
Before the war, Americans were like the crowd in that terrible hall of Eblis which Beckford painted for us,--each man with his hand pressed on the incurable sore in his bosom, and pledged not to speak of it; compared with other lands, we were intellectually and morally a nation of cowards.
When I first entered the Roman States, a custom-house official seized all my French books.
In vain I held up to him a treatise by Fenelon, and explained that it was by a Catholic archbishop of Cambray.
Gruffly he answered, “It makes no difference; it is French.”
As I surrendered the volume to his remorseless grasp, I could not but honor the nation which had
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