Well, we have seen this man, this citizen monarch, who married his children only to kings, rush from his place; his peers and his deputies were unavailing; his office-holders could not sustain him; his army "fraternized with the people;" and he, forgetful of his own children, ignominiously is hustled out of the kingdom, in a street cab, with nothing but a five-franc piece in his pocket. For the lesson thus taught, let us thank him most of all.
Men tell us it is too soon to rejoice: "Perhaps the Revolution will not hold;" "it will not last;" "the kings of Europe will put it down." When a sound, healthy child is born, the friends of the family congratulate the parents then; they do not wait till the child has grown up, and got a beard. Now this is a live child; it is well born in both senses, come of good parentage, and gives signs of a good constitution. Let us rejoice at its birth, and not wait to see if it will grow up. Let us now baptize it in the crystal fountain of our own Hope.
In a great revolution, there are always two things to be looked at, namely, the actions, and the ideas which produce the actions. The actions I will say little of; you have all read of them in the newspapers. Some of the actions were bad. It is not true that all at once the French have become angels. There are low and base men, who swarm in the lanes and alleys of Paris; for that great city also is like all capitals, girt about with a belt of misery, of vice and of crime, eating into her painful loins. It was a bad thing to sack the Tuileries; to burn bridges, and chateaux, and railroad stations. Property is under the insurance of mankind, and the human race must pay in public for private depredations. It was a bad thing to kill men; the human race cannot make up that loss; only suffer and be penitent. I am sorry for these bad actions; but I am not surprised at them. You cannot burn down the poor dwelling of a widow in Boston, but some miserable man will steal pot or pan, in the confusion of the fire. How much more should we expect pillage and violence in the earthquake which throws down a king!
I have said enough of the actions; but there was one deed too symbolical to be passed by. In the garden of the Tuileries, before the great gate of the palace, there stands a statue of Spartacus, a colossal bronze, his broken chain in the left hand, his Roman sword in the right. Spartacus was a Roman gladiator. He broke his chains; gathered about him other gladiators, fugitive slaves, and assembled an army. He and his comrades fought for freedom; they cut off four consular armies sent against them; at last the hero fell amid a heap of men, slain by his own well-practised hand. When the people took the old and emblematic French throne, and burned it solemnly with emblematic fire, they stripped off some of the crimson trappings of the royal seat, made a tiara thereof, and bound it on the gladiator's brazen head! But red is the color of revolution, the color of blood; the unconscious gladiator was an image too savage for new France. So they hid the Roman sword in his hand, and wreathed it all over with a chaplet of flowers!
Let us say a word of the ideas. Three ideas filled the mind of the nation: the idea of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Three noble words. Liberty meant liberty of all. So, at one word, they set free the slaves, and, if my friend's ciphers are correct, at once three hundred thousand souls rise up from the ground disenthralled, free men. That is a great act. A population as large as the whole family of our sober sister Connecticut, all at once find their chains drop off, and they are free: not beasts, but men. This may not hold. Our Declaration of Independence was not the Confederation of '78—still less was it the Constitution of '87. The French may be as false as the Americans to their idea of liberty. At any rate, it is a good beginning. Let us rejoice at that.
Equality means that all are equal before the law; equal in rights, however unequal in mights. So all titles of nobility come at once to the ground. The royal family is like the family of our Presidents. The Chamber of Peers is abolished. Universal suffrage is decreed; all men over twenty-one are voters. Men here in America say, "The French are not ready for that." No doubt the king thought so. At any rate, he was not ready for it. But it is not a thing altogether unknown in France. It has been tried several times before. The French Constitution was accepted by the whole people in 1800; Napoleon was made Consul by the whole people; made Emperor by the whole people. Even in 1815, the "acte additionelle" to the "Charte" was accepted by the whole people. To decree universal suffrage was the most natural thing in the world. Those two ideas, liberty and equality, have long been American ideas; they were never American facts. America sought liberty only for the whites. Our fathers thought not of universal suffrage.
But France has not only attempted to make our ideas into facts; she has advanced an idea not hinted at in the American Declaration; the idea of Fraternity. By this she means human brotherhood. This points not merely to a political, but to a social revolution. It is not easy for us to understand how a government can effect this. Here, all comes from the people, and the people have to take care of the government, meaning thereby the men in official power; have to furnish them with ideas, and tell them what application to make thereof. There all comes from the government. So the new provisional government of France must be one that can lead the nation; have ideas in advance of the nation. Accordingly, it proposes many plans which with us could never have come from any party in power. Here, the government is only the servant of the people. There, it aims to be the father and teacher thereof; a patriarchal government with Christian thoughts and feelings. But as an eloquent man is to come after me, whose special aim is to develop the idea of human brotherhood into social institutions, I will not dwell on this, save to mention an act of the provisional authorities. They have abolished the punishment of death for all political offences. You remember the guillotine, the massacres of September, the drowning in the Loire and the Seine, the dreadful butchery in the name of the law.
Put this new decree side by side with the old, and you see why Spartacus, though crowned by a revolution, bears peaceful blossoms in his hand.
But let us hasten on; time would fail me to speak of the cause or point out the effect of this movement of the people. Only a word concerning the objections made to it. Some say, "It is only an extempore affair. Men drunk with new power are telling their fancies, and trying in their heat to make laws thereof." It is not so. The ideas I have hinted at have been long known and deeply cherished by the best minds in France. Last autumn, M. Lamartine, in his own newspaper, for the deputy for Macon is an editor, published the "Programme and confession of his political faith."[43]
Others say, "The whole thing seems rash." Well, so it does; so does any good thing seem rash to all except the man who does it, and such as would do it if he did not. What is rash to one is not to another. It is dangerous for an old man to run, fatal for him to leap, while his grandson jumps over wall and ditch without hurt. The American Revolution was a rash act; the English Revolution a rash act; the Protestant Reformation was a rash act. Was it safe to withstand the Revolution? Did the king of the French find it so? Yet others say, "The leaders are unknown," "Lamartine, you might as well put any man in the street at the head of the nation." But when the American Revolution begun, who, in England, had ever heard of John Hancock, President of the Congress? To the men who knew him, John Hancock was a country trader, the richest man in a town of ten thousand inhabitants: That did not sound very great at London. Samuel Adams, and John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, and all the other men, what did the world know of them? Only that they had been christened with Hebrew names. Why, George Washington was only, as Gen. Braddock called him, "A young Buckskin." But the world heard of these men afterwards. Let us leave the French statesmen to make to the future what report of themselves they can! Let me tell a story of Dupont de l'Eure, the head of the government at this moment. He was one of the movers of the Revolution of 1830. He dined with the citizen king, once, in some council. At the table, he and the king differed; the king affirmed, and Dupont denied. Said the king, "Do you tell me I lie?" Said Dupont, "When the king says yes, and Dupont de l'Eure replies no, France will know which to believe!" The king said, "Yes, we will put the people down;" Dupont said, "No, you shall not put the people down;" and now France knows which to believe.