PRISONERS OF THE BASTILE.
For an explanation of the action of those poor, irrational creatures who are so accustomed to privation and prayer that when relief comes they only continue to pray, failing to recognize that their prayers are answered, we can only point to the last poor inmates of the French bastile. The most prominent and intellectual citizens of France, they had been torn from their homes without a trial, thrown into dungeons containing not a single ray of light, fed there on bread and water from year to year until lonely and in torture their hair turned prematurely white and their bodies withered. When, at the first stroke of that most glorious of revolutions, the bastile doors were opened, and the soldiers of the people broke down the huge iron gates and doors, crying aloud in the name of liberty, "You are free, you are free, come out long imprisoned brothers," the populace were astounded to find that many of the poor, white-haired, white-bearded, pale-faced prisoners, instead of walking out into the long-wished for sunlight, clutched the walls of their cells, clung to their prison floors and cried in fear. They had to be torn from their gloomy haunts by main force by their rescuers. Their years of trouble, of darkness and gloom had destroyed their power to enjoy the light of freedom. Many of the brightest intellects of France had thus been dimmed. Their souls, once afire for freedom, had burned out in despair. They had become maniacs.
So now there are devotees of religion, so inured to the gloomy slavery of poverty and injustice, so in the habit of praying for relief, that when the bold servants of God strike down with their ready hammers the prison walls, and freedom's air and sunlight stream in, these poor souls are horrified, paralyzed by the very light and atmosphere for which they have been praying. "Go away," they say, and, crying, they clutch their cell walls refusing to be free. They, too, have become maniacs. But the majority of the human race will not refuse freedom's balmy breeze or the sunshine of liberty. At the call of the New Democracy they will throw down their broken chains of poverty, leap through their open prison doors, and cheer with might and main as the majority of the prisoners of the bastile cheered a century ago when they were given freedom's light.