Volume Ii Part 13 (1/2)
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 Hanc.o.c.k, President of the Congress? To the men who knew him, John Hanc.o.c.k 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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.
Again, say others yet, ”War may come; royalty may come back, despotism may come back. Other kings will interpose, and put down a republic.”
Other kings interpose to put down the French! Perhaps they will. They tried it in 1793, but did not like the experiment very well. They will be well off if they do not find it necessary to put down a republic a little nearer at hand; their anti-revolutionary work may begin at home.
War followed the American Revolution. It cost money, it cost men. But if we calculate the value of American ideas, they are worth what they cost. Even the French Revolution, with all its carnage, robbery and butchery, is worth what it cost. But it is possible that war will not come. From a foreign war, France has little to fear. There seems little danger that it will come at all. What monarchy will dare fight republican France? Internal trouble may indeed come. It is to be expected that the new republic will make many a misstep. But is it likely that all the old tragedies will be enacted again? Surely not; the burnt child dreads the fire. Besides, the France of '48 is not the France of '89. There is no triple despotism weighing on the nation's neck, a trinity of despotic powers--the throne, the n.o.bility, the church. The king has fled; the n.o.bles have ceased to be; the church seems republican. There is no hatred between cla.s.s and cla.s.s, as before.
The men of '89 sought freedom for the middle cla.s.s, not for all cla.s.ses, neither for the high, nor for the low. Religion pervades the church and the people, as never before. Better ideas prevail. It is not the gospel of Jean Jaques, and the scoffing negations of Voltaire, that are now proclaimed to the people; but the broad maxims of Christian men; the words of human brotherhood. The men of terror knew no weapon but the sword; the provisional government casts the sword from its hands, and will not shed blood for political crimes.
Still, troubles may come; war may come from without, and, worse still, from within; the republic may end. But if it lasts only a day, let us rejoice in that day. Suppose it is only the dream of the nation; it is worth while to dream of liberty, of equality, of fraternity; and to dream that we are awake, and trying to make them all into inst.i.tutions and common life. What is only a dream now, will be a fact at last.
Next Sunday is the election day of France; six millions of voters are to choose nine hundred representatives! Shall not the prayers of all Christian hearts go up with them on that day, a great deep prayer for their success? The other day, the birthday of Was.h.i.+ngton, the calm, noiseless spirit of death came to release the soul of the patriarch of American statesmen. While his sun was slowly sinking in the western sky, the life-star of a new nation was visibly rising there, far off in the east. A pagan might be pardoned for the thought, that the intrepid soul of that old man foresaw the peril, and, slowly quitting its hold of the worn-out body, went thither to kindle anew the flames of liberty he fanned so often here. That is but a pagan thought. This is a Christian thought: The same G.o.d who formed the world for man's abode, presides also in the movements of mankind, and directs their voluntary march.
See how this earth has been brought to her present firm and settled state. By storm and earthquake, continent has been rent from continent; oceans have swept over the mountains, and the scars of ancient war still mark our parent's venerable face. So is it in the growth of human Society: it is the child of pain; revolutions have rocked its cradle, war and violence rudely nursed it into hardy life. Good inst.i.tutions, how painfully, how slowly have they come!
”Slowly as spreads the green of earth O'er the receding ocean's bed, Dim as the distant stars come forth, Uncertain as a vision slow, Has been the old world's toiling pace, Ere she can give fair freedom place.”
Let us welcome the green spot, when it begins to spread; let us shout as the sterile sea of barbarism goes back; let us rejoice in the vision of good things to come; let us welcome the distant and rising orb, for it is the Bethlehem star of a great nation, and they who behold it may well say--”Peace on earth, and good-will to men.”
FOOTNOTES:
[42] Mr. Wendell Phillips.
[43] See the _Courier des Etats Unis_, for Nov. 24, 1847, which contains pa.s.sages from M. Lamartine's programme, which set forth all the schemes that the provisional government had afterwards tried to carry out.
VIII.
SPEECH AT FANEUIL HALL, BEFORE THE NEW ENGLAND ANTI-SLAVERY CONVENTION, MAY 31, 1848.
The design of the Abolitionists is this,--to remove and destroy the inst.i.tution of slavery. To accomplish this well, two things are needed, ideas and actions. Of the ideas first, and then a word of the actions.
What is the idea of the abolitionists? Only this, That all men are created free, endowed with unalienable rights; and in respect of those rights, that all men are equal. This is the idea of Christianity, of human nature. Of course, then, no man has a right to take away another's rights; of course, no man may use me for his good, and not my own good also; of course, there can be no owners.h.i.+p of man by man; of course, no slavery in any form. Such is the idea, and some of the most obvious doctrines that follow from it.
Now, the abolitionists aim to put this idea into the minds of the people, knowing that if it be there, actions will follow fast enough.
It seems a very easy matter to get it there. The idea is nothing new; all the world knows it. Talk with men, democrats and whigs, they will say they like freedom in the abstract, they hate slavery in the abstract. But you find that somehow they like slavery in the concrete, and dislike abolitionism when it tries to set free the slave. Slavery is the affair of the whole people; not Congress, but the nation, made slavery; made it national, const.i.tutional. Not Congress, but the voters, must unmake slavery; make it un-const.i.tutional, un-national. They say Congress cannot do it. Well, perhaps it is so; but they that make can break. If the people made slavery, they can unmake it.
You talk with the people; the idea of freedom is there. They tell you they believe the Declaration of Independence--that all men are created equal. But somehow they contrive to believe that negroes now in bondage are an exception to the rule, and so they tell us that slavery must not be meddled with, that we must respect the compromises of the Const.i.tution. So we see that respect for the Const.i.tution overrides respect for the inalienable rights of three millions of negro men.
Now, to move men, it is necessary to know two things--first, What they think, and next, Why they think it. Let us look a little at both.
In New England, men over twenty-one years old may be divided into two cla.s.ses. First, the men that vote, and secondly, the men that choose the Governor. The voters in Ma.s.sachusetts are some hundred and twenty thousand; the men that choose the Governor, who tell the people how to vote, whom to vote for, what laws to make, what to forbid, what policy to pursue--they are not very numerous. You may take one hundred men out of Boston, and fifty men from the other large towns in the State--and if you could get them to be silent till next December, and give no counsel on political affairs, the people would not know what to do. The democrats would not know what to do, nor the whigs. We are a very democratic people, and suffrage is almost universal; but it is a very few men who tell us how to vote, who make all the most important laws.
Do I err in estimating the number at one hundred and fifty? I do not like to exaggerate--suppose there are six hundred men, three hundred in each party; that six hundred manage the political action of the State, in ordinary times.
I need not stop to ask what the rest of the people think about freedom and slavery. What do the men who control our politics think thereof? I answer, They are not opposed to slavery; to the slavery of three millions of men. They may not like slavery in the abstract, or they may like it, I do not pretend to judge; but slavery in the concrete, at the South, they do like; opposition to that slavery, in the mildest form, or the sternest, they do hate.
That is a serious charge to bring against the prominent rulers of the State. Let me call your attention to a few facts which prove it. Look at the men we send to Congress. There are thirty-one New England men in Congress. By the most liberal construction you can only make out five anti-slavery men in the whole number. Who ever heard of an anti-slavery Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts in this century? Men know what they are about when they select candidates for election. Do the voters always know what they are about when they choose them?
Then these men always are in favor of a pro-slavery President. The President must be a slaveholder. There have been fifteen presidential elections. Men from the free States have filled the chair twelve years, or three terms; men from the slave States forty-four years, or eleven terms. During one term, the chair was filled by an amphibious presidency, by General Harrison, who was nothing but a concrete availability, and John Tyler, who was--John Tyler. They called him an accident; but there are no accidents in politics. A slaveholder presides over the United States forty-eight years out of sixty! Do those men who control the politics of New England not like it? It is no such thing.
They love to have it so. We have just seen the democratic party, or their leaders, nominate General Ca.s.s for their candidate--and General Ca.s.s is a northern man; but on that account is he any the less a pro-slavery man? He did oppose the South once, but it was in pressing a war with England. Everybody knows General Ca.s.s, and I need say no more about him. But the northern whigs have their leaders--are they anti-slavery men? Not a whit more. Next week you will see them nominate, not the great Eastern whig, though he is no opponent of slavery, only an Expounder and Defender of the Const.i.tution; not the great Western whig, the Compromiser, though steeped to the lips in slavery; no, they will nominate General Taylor, a man who lives a little further south, and is at this moment dyed a little more scarlet with the sin of slavery.
But go a step further as to the proof. Those men who control the politics of Ma.s.sachusetts, or New England, or the whole North, they have never opposed the aggressive movements of the slave power. The annexation of Texas, did they oppose that? No, they were glad of it.