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[1851.]
Bernardin St. Pierre, in his
Wishes of a Solitary, asks for his country neither wealth, nor military glory, nor magnificent palaces and monuments, nor splendor of court nobility, nor clerical pomp.
‘Rather,’ he says, ‘O
France, may no beggar tread thy plains, no sick or suffering man ask in vain for relief; in all thy hamlets may every young woman find a lover and every lover a true wife; may the young be trained arightly and guarded from evil; may the old close their days in the tranquil hope of those who love God and their fellow-men.’
We are reminded of the amiable wish of the
French essayist—a wish even yet very far from realization, we fear, in the empire of Napoleon III. —by the perusal of two documents recently submitted to the legislature of the State of
Massachusetts.
They indicate, in our view, the real glory of a state, and foreshadow the coming of that time when
Milton's definition of a true commonwealth shall be no longer a prophecy, but the description of an existing fact,—‘a huge Christian personage, a mighty growth and stature of an honest man, moved by the purpose of a love of God and of mankind.’
