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the Land-tax Act1 which raises your revenue? that it is the annual vote in the Committee of Supply which gives you your army? or that it is the Mutiny Bill which inspires it with bravery and discipline? No! surely, no! It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience without which your army would be a base rabble and your navy nothing but rotten timber.

All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians who have no place among us; a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material; and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly taught, these ruling and master principles, which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth every thing, and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds3 go ill together.

If we are conscious of our situation, and glow with

1 Land-tax. This tax was formerly a much more important item in the British revenue than now: it used to contribute more than a third of the whole, now only about one sixty-fourth.

2 chimerical. See Webster. 3 a great empire and little minds. What is the figure of

speech?

4 If we are, etc. What kind of sentence?

zeal to fill our place as becomes our station and ourselves, we ought to auspicate1 all our public proceedings on America with the old warning of the Church, Sursum corda!2 We ought to elevate our minds to the greatness of that trust to which the order of Providence has called us. By adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire, and have made the most extensive and the only honorable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race. Let us get an American revenue as we have got an American empire. English privileges have made it all that it is: English privileges alone will make it all it can be.

2.-TREATMENT OF THE KING AND QUEEN OF FRANCE.

[The following is an extract from Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (published in 1790), to which reference has been made in the Introduction. Its purpose is to contrast the license of the revolutionary spirit, as shown in the treatment of the king and royal family of France, with the spirit of old European manners and opinions.]

3

HISTORY will record that, on the morning of the 6th of October, 1789, the king and queen of France,

1 auspicate. See Webster.

2 Sursum corda! These words are from the old Latin CommunionOffice of the Church. The English of them is, "Lift up your hearts." | 3 History will record, etc. For a summary of revolutionary events preceding the march of the Paris

ian mob to Versailles, and the compulsory "Joyous Entry" of the king and royal family, see Swinton's Outlines of History, pp. 409–418. Carlyle's marvelous account of the journey from Versailles to Paris. See the History of the French Revolution, Bock VII., Chap. XI.

after a day of confusion, alarm, dismay, and slaughter, lay down, under the pledged security of public faith, to indulge nature in a few hours of respite, and troubled, melancholy repose. From this sleep the queen was

first startled by the voice of the sentinel at her door,1 who cried out to her to save herself by flight; that this was the last proof of fidelity he could give; that they were upon him, and he was dead. Instantly he was cut down. A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with a hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked, and, through ways unknown to the murderers, had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband not secure of his own life for a moment.

This king, to say no more of him, and this queen, and their infant children (who once would have been the pride and hope of a great and generous people), were then forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most

has nevertheless crawled hither; and shall live, honored of loyal France." - CARLYLE.

2 pierced. . . the bed. This has

1 sentinel at her door, etc. M. de Miomandre. "Lo, another voice shouts far through the outermost door, 'Save the queen!' and the door is shut. It is brave Mio-been denied; it is impossible to say mandre's voice that shouts this second warning. He has stormed across imminent death to do it; fronts imminent death, having done it. . . . But did brave Miomandre perish then, at the queen's outer door? No, he was fractured, slashed, lacerated, left for dead: he

whether it is true. Once for all it should be observed, that Burke's narrative must be taken with many qualifications. He was too near the events (he wrote within a few months of their occurrence) to know the exact truth.

3 sanctuary. See Glossary.

splendid palace in the world, which they left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses. Thence they were conducted into the capital of their kingdom.1

Two had been selected 2 from the unprovoked, unresisted, promiscuous slaughter which was made of the gentlemen of birth and family who composed the king's body-guard. These two gentlemen, with all the parade of an execution of justice, were cruelly and publicly dragged to the block, and beheaded in the great court of the palace. Their heads were stuck upon spears, and led the procession; whilst the royal captives who followed in the train were slowly moved along, amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling 3 screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women. After they had been made to taste, drop by drop, more than the bitterness of death, in the slow torture of a journey of twelve miles protracted to six hours, they were, under a guard composed of those very soldiers who had thus conducted them through this famous triumph, lodged in one of the old palaces of Paris, now converted into a Bastile for kings.5

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Although this work of our new light and knowledge1 did not go to the length that in all probability it was intended to be carried, yet I must think that such treatment of any human creatures must be shocking to any but those who are made for accomplishing revolutions. But I can not stop here. Influenced by the inborn feelings of my nature, and not being illuminated by a single ray of this new-sprung modern light, I confess to you, sir, that the exalted rank of the persons suffering, and particularly the sex, the beauty, and the amiable qualities of the descendant 2 of so many kings and emperors, with the tender age of royal infants, insensible only through infancy and innocence of the cruel outrages to which their parents were exposed, instead of being a subject of exultation, adds not a little to my sensibility on that most melancholy occasion.

I hear that the august person, who was the principal object of our preacher's triumph,3 though he supported himself, felt much on that shameful occasion. As a man, it became him to feel for his wife and his children, and the faithful guards of his person that were massacred in cold blood about him: as a prince, it became him to feel for the strange and frightful transformation of his civilized subjects, and to be more grieved for them than solicitous for himself. It dero

1 new light and knowledge. Ironical. Point out another use of irony in this paragraph.

3 of our preacher's triumph. The reference is to Dr. Price, who had lately published a sermon

2 the descendant, etc. The glorifying the doings of the French queen, Marie Antoinette. revolutionists.

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