Can you not see, my friend (the reader), in all this some striking points of resemblance between the rise, progress, and fall of the Theban Republic, and the rise, progress, and what threatened to be the fall of our own government in the late rebellion?
According to European notions, we had a sort of republic, a sort of representative form of government, prior to 1776; but it was rather an oligarchy than a republic, and Washington, Adams, John Hancock, and others, determined to have a real republic or die in the attempt. Seven years of terrible struggle and fearful sacrifice brought their wishes to a successful issue. From 1783 until 1822 the course of this republic was one blaze of glory, equal to anything that Thebes could ever boast. Meanwhile the jealous eyes of many European Philips had been looking on, and finally a Congress at Vienna, in 1822, entered into a solemn treaty with each other (two of the articles of which we have heretofore quoted) that representative governments, and the liberty of the press, were "incompatible" (that is the word) with "monarchical principles," and therefore ought to be abolished. In pursuance of this resolve the Philips of Europe began to send their gold into this country, of which no less than $612,656 were sent from a single city of France (Lyons) in four years, as we have heretofore shown from their own published reports. True, this was but a drop in the bucket, but it shows that the drops came from thick-lipped vials, and consequently were very large drops. Among the contributions made about that time, it was announced, with a great flourish of trumpets and as greatly to his credit, that the Emperor of Austria had contributed twenty thousand francs to "The Society for the Propagation of the Faith." For the propagation of what? Of the faith? God save the mark! Had the item read, For the propagation of the Democratic party, and, through it, monarchical principles, it would, in our humble judgment, have been nearer the truth. Of course we do not know—no one ever can know—what proportion of the money contributed in Europe and sent to this country (nominally to propagate the faith of the Catholic Church) went into the hands of State and National Democratic Executive Committees; but this we do know, as well as we know any conclusion drawn from known facts by deduction, that the money so sent had for its ultimate object (no matter into whose hands it first fell) more the destruction of the representative form of this government, and the liberty of the press, than the propagation of any religious faith.
And let us pause a moment just here to say, that the process of investigation and of reasoning by which we arrive at the above conclusion, and at other conclusions heretofore announced, is very near to certainty, nor is it at all mystical. As Professor Huxley very aptly says, when writing of the results of induction and deduction, "The vast results obtained by science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes, other than those which are practised by every one of us in the humblest and meanest walks of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones. Nor does that process of induction and deduction by which a lady, finding a stain of a particular kind upon her dress, concludes that somebody has upset the inkstand thereon, differ in any way from that by which Adams and Leverrier discovered a new planet. The man of science, in fact, simply uses with scrupulous exactness the methods which we all habitually and at every moment use carelessly."
Though our present treatise is on history rather than on science, we have used the facts which have fallen in our way from a somewhat extensive reading and study of history with as much "scrupulous exactness" as though we had been writing upon science, and we feel within our own breast that the conclusions reached are very near, if not a dead, certainty. We did not make the facts that we have used. They have been parts of current history from time to time, extending through a period of nearly three thousand years. We have simply put the facts in logical form—in the form of proposition and proof—and then drawn therefrom such inferences as seemed natural and inevitable. Politicians will say, we know, that our conclusions are the result of preconceived opinions; bigots in religion will say that our conclusions are founded upon prejudice; but neither the one nor the other will be true. Take the same facts, and we defy any logician or rhetorician in the world to reach different conclusions, if honest with his own conscience before God.
