Page images
PDF
EPUB

L.

of liberty, a band of exiles, keeping watch by night, CHAP. heard the glad tidings which promised the po- 1774. A revolution, May.

litical regeneration of the world.

unexpected in the moment of its coming, but prepared by glorious forerunners, grew naturally and necessarily out of the series of past events by the formative principle of a living belief. And why should man organize resistance to the grand design of Providence? Why should not the consent of the ancestral land and the gratulations of every other call the young nation to its place among the powers of the earth? Britain was the mighty mother who bred and formed men capable of laying the foundation of so noble an empire; and she alone could have formed them. She had excelled all nations of the world as the planter of colonies. The condition which entitled her colonies to independence was now more than fulfilled. Their vigorous vitality refused conformity to foreign laws and external rule. They could take no other way to perfection than by the unconstrained development of that which was within them. They were not only able to govern themselves, they alone were able to do so; subordination visibly repressed their energies. It was only by self-direction that they could at all times and in entireness freely employ in action their collective and individual powers to the fullest extent of their ever increasing intelligence. Could not the illustrious nation which had gained no distinction in war, in literature, or in science, comparable to that of having wisely founded distant settlements on a system of liberty, willingly perfect its beneficent work, now when no more was required than the acknowledgment that its offspring was come

I.

May.

CHAP. of age, and its own duty accomplished? Why must the ripening of lineal virtue be struck at, as rebellion 1774. in the lawful sons? Why is their unwavering attachment to the essential principle of their existence to be persecuted as treason, rather than viewed with delight as the crowning glory of the country from which they sprung? If the institutions of Britain were so deeply fixed in the usages and opinions of its people, that their deviations from justice could not as yet be rectified; if the old continent was pining under systems of authority which were not fit to be borne, and which as yet no way opened to amend, why should not a people be heartened to build a commonwealth in the wilderness, which alone offered it a home?

So reasoned a few in Britain who were jeered "as visionary enthusiasts; " deserving no weight in public affairs. Parliament had asserted an absolute lordship over the colonies in all cases whatsoever; and fretting itself into a frenzy at the denial of its unlimited dominion, was blindly destroying all its recognised authority in the madness of its zeal for more. The majority of the ministers, including the most active and determined, were bent on the immediate employment of force. Lord North, who recoiled from civil war, exercised no control over his colleagues, leaving the government to be conducted by the several departments. As a consequence, the king became the only point of administrative union, and ruled as well as reigned. In him an approving conscience had no misgiving as to his duty. His heart knew no relenting; his will never wavered. Though America were to be drenched in blood and its towns reduced to

I.

May.

ashes, though its people were to be driven to struggle CHAP. for total independence, though he himself should find it necessary to bid high for hosts of mercenaries 1774. from the Scheldt to Moscow, and in quest of savage allies, go tapping at every wigwam from Lake Huron to the Gulf of Mexico, he was resolved to coerce the thirteen colonies into submission. The people of Great Britain identified themselves, though but for the moment, with his anger, and talked like so many kings of their subjects beyond the Atlantic. Of their ability to crush resistance they refused to doubt; nor did they, nor the ministers, nor George the Third, apprehend interference, except from that great neighboring kingdom whose vast colonial system Britain had just overthrown.

All Europe, though at peace, was languishing under exhaustion from wars of ambition, or vices of government, and crying out for relief from abuses which threatened to dissolve the old social order. In France, enduring life belonged to two elements only in the state the people and monarchical power; and every successive event increased the importance of the one and the other. It was its common people which saved that country from perishing of corrupt unbelief, and made it the most powerful state of continental Europe. The peasants, it is true, were poor and oppressed and ignorant; but all Frenchmen, alike townspeople and villagers, were free. There was no protecting philanthropy on the part of the nobility; no hierarchy of mutually dependent ranks; no softening of contrasts by the blending of colors and harmonizing of shades; the poor, though gay by temperament, lived sad and apart; bereft of intercourse with

[blocks in formation]

May.

CHAP. superior culture; never mirthful but in mockery of I. misery; not cared for in their want, nor solaced in 1774. hospitals, nor visited in prisons; but the bonds had been struck alike from the mechanic in the workshop and the hind in the fields. The laborer at the forge was no longer a serf; the lord of the manor exercised jurisdiction no more over vassals; in all of old France the peasants were freemen, and in the happiest provinces had been so for half a thousand years. Only a few of them, as of the nobles in the middle ages, could read; but a vast number owned the acres which they tilled. By lineage, language, universality of personal freedom, and diffusion of landed property, the common people of France formed one compact and indivisible nation.

Two circumstances which increased the wretchedness of the third estate, increased also their importance. The feudal aristocracy had been called into being for the protection of the kingdom; but in the progress of ages, they had escaped from the obligation to military service. In this manner they ceased to be the peers of their sovereign; and though they still scorned every profession but that of arms, they received their commissions from the king's favor, and drew from his exchequer their pay as hirelings. Thus the organization of the army ceased to circumscribe royal power, which now raised soldiers directly from the humbler classes. The defence of the country had passed from the king and his peers with their vassals to the king in direct connection with those vassals who were thus become a people.

Again, the nobility, carefully securing the exemption of their own estates, had, in their struggles with

I.

May.

the central power, betrayed the commons, by allow- CHAP. ing the monarch to tax them at will. Proving false to their trust as the privileged guardians of liberty, 1774. and renouncing the military service that had formed the motive to their creation, they made themselves an insulated and worthless caste. All that was beneficent in feudalism had died out. Soulless relics of the past, the nobles threw up their hereditary rustic independence to fasten themselves as courtiers upon the treasury. They hung like a burden on the state, which they no longer guided, nor sustained, nor defended, nor consoled. Some few among them, rising superior to their rank, helped to bear society onwards to its regeneration; but as a class their life was morally at an end. France could throw them off as readily as a stag sheds its antlers. They had abdicated their political importance, which passed to the people. The imposts which they refused to share, and which in two centuries had increased tenfold, fell almost exclusively on the lowly, who toiled and suf fered, having no redress against those employed by the government; regarding the monarch with touching reverence and love, though they knew him mostly as the power that harried them; ruled as though joy were no fit companion for labor; as though want were the necessary goad to industry, and sorrow the only guarantee of quiet. They were the strength of the kingdom, the ceaseless producers of its wealth; the supplier of its armies; the sole and exhaustless source of its revenue; and yet, in their forlornness, they cherished scarcely a dim vision of a happier futurity below.

Meantime monarchy was concentrating a mass of

« PreviousContinue »