The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 05/Discourse 03
SPEECH
AT A MEETING OF
THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY,
TO CELEBRATE
THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY BY THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, APRIL 6, 1848.
Mr Chairman,—The gentleman before me[1] has made an allusion to Rome. Let me also turn to that same. city. Underneath the Rome of the Emperors, there was another Rome; not seen by the sun, known only to a few men. Above, in the sunlight, stood Rome of the Caesars, with her markets and her armies, her theatres, her temples, and her palaces, glorious and of marble. A million men went through her brazen gates. The imperial city, she stood there, beautiful and admired, the queen of nations. But underneath all that, in caverns of the earth, in the tombs of dead men, in quarries whence the upper city had been slowly hewn, there was another population, another Rome, with other thoughts; yes, a devout body of men, who swore not by the public altars; men whose prayers were forbidden; their worship disallowed, their ideas prohibited, their very lives illegal. Time passed on; and gradually Rome of the pagans disappeared, and Rome of the Christians sat there in her place, on the Seven Hills, and stretched out her sceptre over the nations.
So underneath the laws and the institutions of each modern nation, underneath the monarchy and the republic, there is another and unseen state, with sentiments not yet become popular, and with ideas not yet confirmed in actions, not organized into institutions, ideas scarcely legal, certainly not respectable. Slowly from its depths comes up this ideal state, the state of the future ; and slowly to the eternal deep sinks down the actual state, the state of the present. But sometimes an earthquake of the nations degrades of a sudden the actual; and speedily starts up the ideal kingdom of the future. Such a thing has just come to pass. In France, within five-and-forty days, a new state has arisen from underneath the old. Men, whose words were suppressed, and their ideas reckoned illegal but two months ago, now hold the sceptre of five-and-thirty millions of grateful citizens, hold it in clean and powerful hands. A great revolution has taken place; one which will produce effects that we cannot foresee. It is itself the greatest act of this century. God only knows what it will lead to. We are here to express the sympathy of republicans for a new republic. We are here to rejoice over the rising hopes of the new state, not to exult over the fallen fortunes of the Bourbons. Louis Philippe has done much which we may thank him for. He has kept mainly at peace the fiercest nation in the world; has kept the peace of Europe for seventeen years. Let us thank him for that. He has consolidated the French nation, helped to give them a new unity of thought and unity of action, which they had not before. Perhaps he did not intend all this. Since he has brought it about, let us thank him for it, even if his conduct transcended his intention. But, most of all, I would thank this "Citizen King" for another thing. His greatest lesson is his last. He has shown that five-and-thirty millions of Frenchmen, in this nineteenth century, are only to be ruled by justice and the eternal law of right. We have seen this crafty king, often wise and always cunning, driven from his throne. He was the richest man in Europe, and the embodiment of the idea of modern wealth. He had an army the best disciplined, probably, in the world, and, as he thought, completely in his power. He had a Chamber of Peers of his own appointment; a Chamber of Deputies almost of his own election. He ruled a nation that contained three hundred thousand office-holders, appointed by himself, and only two hundred and forty thousand voters! Who sat so safe as the citizen king on his throne, surrounded by republican institutions! So confident was he, as the journals tell, that he bade a friend stop a day or two, "and see how I will put down the people!" For once, this shrewd calculator reckoned without his host.
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 officeholders 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 give 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 lire. 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 lire, 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 colour of revolution, the colour 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, freemen. 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 maybe 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 came 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 develope 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."[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 Eevolution 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.
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 nobility, the church. The king has fled; the nobles have ceased to be; the church seems republican. There is no hatred between class and class, as before. The men of '89 sought freedom for the middle class, not for all classes, 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 a 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 institutions 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 Washington, 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 God 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 institutions, 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."