Morgan Certainly Shaved.
When
Charlotte Corday was brought to the scaffold for staying that execrable monster, Marat, she turned calmly to the rabble who were venting their rage for the death of their deminged in the most unmanly taunts and execrations, and repeating the sublime sentiment of the
French dramatist.--
"C'est la crima qui fail la houte et non pa l'echaffisad."
[Guilt brings shame, not the scaffold.]
quietly laid herself down to die. She believed that she had been guilty of no crime.
She had slain a wretch who had saturated the soil of her country with the blood of its noblest children — whose thirst for human gore was insatiable and unappeasable — who had proclaimed the horrible determination that 300,000 more heads should fall — who was an enemy alike to God his country, and the human race — and who, she but too well knew, had unbounded power to execute his terrible threat.
A brutal populace — degraded to the last degree by the libations of human blood which it quaffed as the thirsty man drinks water — regarded her as undergoing the last degree of disgrace because she was led to the guillotine in the dress of a criminal, and with her head shorn of the beautiful looks which had lately been its ornament.
But the should of the heroic girl remained unshaken.
She knew that the disgrace consisted not in the punishment but in the crime, and she felt that she had committed no crime in sacrificing herself for the benefit, of her country, and of all her countrymen and country women.
The degraded wretches who exulted in the punishment of
Morgan as a condemned criminal believed, no doubt, that they were inflicting a deep disgrace upon him by shaving his head and dressing him in the apparel of a jail bird.
These paltry souls could know nothing of the difference between crime and punishment; or, rather, they thought that crime was perfectly legitimate if it could escape punishment.
They believed that the world would cease to sympathize with the hero as soon as it saw him in the garb of a criminal.
They could not estimate the subline sentiment that "a great man struggling with adversity is a spectacle pleasing to the gods." Degrade
John Morgan!
They — the very refuse of humanity — lost to every noble sentiment — dead to every generous emotion — they degrade
John Morgan!. They may as well try to extinguish the soul which lifted him above the pain of his situation and to exult in the knowledge that they could only inflict injury upon the mortal part of him.
In all ages the tyrants who have inflicted punishment upon the patriot and the sage for loving his country and serving it too well, have succeeded to the execration of posterity.--Who would have known aught of the murderers who slew
Socrates by a false sentence, had they not come down to us linked with the name of their victim?
Who is most respected by posterity —
Machiavelli or the Median by whom he was tortured and imprisoned?
Did the criminal's cap, and death upon the gallows, make
Wallace less respectable, or the ungenerous monarch, whose prisoner he was, more admired by succeeding ages?
This very deed, if he were not already damned in the eyes of all mankind except the detestable race of which he is the proper type and fitting ruler, would cause the name of
Abraham Lincoln to become a hissing and a reproach to all the nations of the earth.
But he is already damned in the estimation of mankind and we suppose, has nothing to lose.--Who had not rather be
John Morgan, in his cominal's garb, than
Abraham Lincoln arrayed in
Oriental purple?
Does our Government intend to make no reprisal for this atrocious outrage?
Does it mean to admit that we are — in very truth — the rebels and criminals that
Lincoln has proclaimed us?
It has already been seen that moderation and forbearance only stimulate to increased outrage.
Would it not be as well to try the virtues of a more vigorous policy?