The Arena, Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891

by Various

He in no way deserves the shameful imprisonment he is suffering; yet the prejudice of the majority sustains the infamous law that makes criminals of the innocent and takes not into consideration the rights of the minority. And what is more, the religious press is so dominated by bigotry and ancient prejudice that it is blind alike to the Golden Rule and the inexorable demands of justice. If in any State the Adventists, the Hebrews, or any other people who believed in observing Saturday instead of Sunday should happen to predominate, and they undertook to throw Christians into dungeons, and after branding them criminals should send them to the penitentiary for working on Saturday, indignation would blaze forth throughout Christendom against the great injustice, the wrong against the liberty of the rights of the citizen. The only difference is that poor Mr. King is in the minority; he is the type of those who always have been and always will be made to suffer when the government is strong enough to persecute all who do not accept what is considered truth and right by the majority.

In replying to my paper Mr. Bellamy thus flippantly dismissed this case: “Of this it may be remarked that had it happened two centuries ago it would have been symptomatic; to-day it is a curiosity.” It will be observed that in order to minify the dangers of Paternalism, Mr. Bellamy entirely ignored the point I had italicized, viz.: the Christian sentiment of society was not outraged and what was more, “the religious press was so dominated by bigotry and ancient prejudice that it was blind alike to the Golden Rule and the inexorable demands of justice.” To-day we are told that this great judicial crime is a curiosity, although the religious bigotry of the majority has been upheld by the lower, the federal, and supreme courts, while the religious press has, with rare exceptions, sanctioned the persecution or ignored the case.

In vain the long-cherished idea that this country was to pass down the cycle of time known as the land of freedom; that it was to be forever the asylum for religious liberty and the cradle of progress, unless the sober thought of our people be at once aroused to stem the rising tide of Governmentalism and the steady encroachment of religious organizations and despotic foreign thought.

Comparatively few of the leading secular journals[6] have deemed this outrage sufficiently important to call for editorial comment, notwithstanding it marks the establishing of a precedent which must inevitably work great misery to innocent people at the hands of religious fanatics, unless there is a sufficient agitation to cause the repeal of many iniquitous laws which are a menace to the rightful freedom of citizens as long as they remain on the statute books.

SOCIAL CONDITIONS UNDER LOUIS XV. A LESSON FOR THE PRESENT DAY.

To the superficial observer who, as guests of royalty, loitered through the sunny days which marked the closing years of Louis XV., France presented the aspect of a gay, thoughtless, happy, butterfly nation, whose government on the whole satisfied the requirements of the rich and powerful, and was sustained by the strong arm of the army on the one hand and the impregnable influence of the Church on the other. Small heed was to be given to the pamphleteers, whose brilliant satire, biting sarcasm, and pointed logic afforded amusement at the Louvre, rather than struck dismay to the hearts of those who fondly believed that the Church still held in thrall the brain of the masses, and that as for centuries the people had been content with slavery and vassalage, it was absurd to imagine they had now come to man’s estate, had, Phœnix-like, arisen from the ashes of old-time sullen obedience or ignorant content, into the tumultuous atmosphere of intellectual activity. It is true, some far-seeing brains beheld the coming storm and warned the king, urging him to either suppress the philosophers, or concede to the masses a greater meed of justice, but their views were scouted by the ruling or conventional thought of the court, and life at the Louvre continued a merry whirl of carnal and selfish delight. The morning brought the chases, and evening the banquet, the theatre, or the ball; while at intervals grand polytechnic exhibitions delighted the populace, being given, probably, in the vain hope that they would satisfy the rising discontent, much as the gladiatorial shows satisfied, while they still further brutalized, the degraded populace of ancient Rome, making possible the toleration of such colossal iniquity as marked the decline of the Empire. Such, then, was the aspect of court life, while above the social and political horizon were gathering clouds which prophesied the greatest cataclysm civilization had witnessed. The wilful short-sightedness, the supreme indifference to the principles of justice, liberty, and fraternity; the conspicuous absence of the spirit of humanity, which characterized those who might have averted the coming baptism of blood, was the legitimate result of the anæsthetizing of the soul of the Court and aristocracy with the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. The divine spark had disappeared. The spiritual nature had given way to the sensual. Ambition and pleasure were enthroned in the seats of justice and humanity. Selfishness was the keynote of aristocratic life. And with this fact kept in view, the short-sightedness of royalty in the presence of the rising tide of intelligent discontent is by no means strange. Indifferent to the fate of the masses in any struggle that might be precipitated, guided by none of the higher impulses of life, and possessing implicit confidence in the impregnability of that triple bulwark of conservatism, the army, the police, and the Church, the ruling party of French aristocracy drifted down the stream garlanded with roses, revelling in wine and music, abandoning itself to pleasure on life’s lowest plane.

To the student of social conditions, who might have been a guest of the philosopher Rousseau, the picture photographed on the mental retina would have been far different. Above he would have beheld the round of selfish, thoughtless gaiety, in which the images and intrigues of Madame Dubarry and Marie Antoinette, of Choiseul and Rohan, of Louis and Richelieu, were strangely mingled and distorted by exaggeration, as they sifted down from the Court through several layers of brains until they reached the world of the newly awakened laborer. Below him would have yawned, in all its hideousness, the blackness of the pit, the social cellar into which he would have seen thousands and scores of thousands of his fellow-men crowded or driven by want, misfortune, or the avarice of the more powerful, and from which so few who once fall ever rose to the noble estate of true manhood and womanhood. Around him he would have noted still another world, more interesting and yet more terrible in its ferocity and power than those above and below—the realm of the common people—the sphere of the masses—the current which passed over the darkest dregs and bore on its surface the scum. In this world the strange and interesting phenomenon would have met his eye of a newly awakened brain, an intellect which after ages of semi-unconsciousness, had, in a surprisingly short time, been aroused by the intellectual brilliancy of thinkers who had flooded a nation with new ideas, who had kindled the fires of justice, who had spoken in the ear of all the people the doctrine of the essential brotherhood of man, the kinship of the throne and the shop, the idler in the palace and the idler in the cellar; the cormorant who dined off the labor of others at Lucerne, and the low-browed outcasts occupied in the same way but pursuing different methods, in the social sewer. And he would have noticed an unusual activity in this working world; secret meetings were being held on every hand. The great philosophical works of Rousseau breathing a new hope and a larger life into the soul of every reader, and the withering satire of Voltaire falling against the battlements of the church and the throne—these were the text-books and watchword of the new revolution. Tens of thousands of men who a few years before had accepted unquestioningly the assurance of the priests and obeyed as children the decrees of Royalty, were now thinking as never before on justice and equity, were students and intelligent expounders of the master brains which blossomed forth on every hand, in spite of priest and police. Heresy and liberty, justice and freedom, progress and equity had joined hands; conventionalism was doomed. The cry for justice went up from every hand to the crown and the aristocracy, only to come back with a mocking laugh or a royal restrictive decree. Thus the flame was fanned. The noble teaching of the great apostles of light and justice which illuminated the brains of the people and at first filled their hearts with holy love and wonderful tenderness, making them ready to accept and only desirous of receiving that measure of justice and consideration to which they knew they were entitled, later changed to feelings of hate and desire for revenge which ever grows as mushrooms in the average mind when justice is denied and oppression bears down more relentlessly at each complaint that comes from the oppressed. It is a law of life on the lower plane that selfishness, indifference, and heartlessness coming from above are photographed upon the sensitive intellect of the struggling minds below, which vainly ask for justice, only to return in time intensified a hundred-fold—selfishness becomes active and is complemented by an insane desire to destroy. Indifference calls forth unbridled ferocity. Heartlessness awakens sentiments of cruelty and brutality as relentless and destructive as the cyclone.

The social sewer or cellar of Paris at this time presented as interesting and suggestive a study as the toiling world above. Here were thousands of human beings dwelling in the atmosphere of crime and brutality, hungry, cold, and well-nigh hopelessly vicious by virtue of want, association, and environment, and ready for, if not eagerly anticipating any social upheaval which would afford them an opportunity to plunder and pillage. This world presented then, as it ever must, the saddest and most hopeless spectacle in the kaleidoscope of life. There were scores of thousands in this social sewer and new recruits coming daily. The avarice and extravagance of the Court pressed upon the great stratum of middle life, which in time bore down upon the lower sphere with crushing weight, while many of its numbers, weary of the eternal struggle, relaxed their hold on respectability and fell into the pit of crime and moral death. The inhabitants of this realm presented a picture of ferocity and despair, which must necessarily prove a frightful element in a revolution. The social cellar was only waiting for the signal when its hideous throat would belch forth death as surely as cannon or mortar ever hurled the life-destroying bomb. Such was life in France in the world of the wealthy and the world of want; while Louis drank Dubarry’s health; while Marie Antoinette longed for her childhood home, and the Dauphin busied himself with geography, lock-making, and clock-repairing.

When Louis XV. died the scum had so thoroughly poisoned the great current of life in France that it is probable that even had there been far wiser heads at the helm of State than Louis XVI. and his councillor they would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to prevent a bloody reckoning, for the love of peace and reverence for justice, the cool judgment and mature wisdom which swayed the popular mind at an early day was well-nigh drowned in the rising tide of angry discontent and intense hate. A settled conviction pervaded the soul of the masses that the hour had come when might should make right the age-long wrongs of the people; and when an idea of this character possesses the rank and file of a nation it is almost impossible even by a liberal policy to avert a bloody issue.