trusted her. And with our growth, so grow her demands. She will have no half service! Liberty! It is a word to conjure1 with, not to vex the ear in empty boastings. For Liberty means justice, and justice is the natural law, -the law of health and symmetry and strength, of fraternity and co-operation. 4 They who look upon Liberty as having accomplished her own mission when she has abolished hereditary privileges and given men the ballot, who think of her as having no further relations to the every-day affairs of life, have not seen her real grandeur: to them the poets who have sung of her must seem rhapsodists,5 and her martyrs fools! As the sun is the lord of life, as well as of light; as his beams not merely pierce the clouds, but support all growth, supply all motion, and call forth from what would otherwise be a cold and inert mass all the infinite diversities of being and beauty, so is Liberty to mankind. It is not for an abstraction that men have toiled and died, that in every age the witnesses of Liberty have stood forth, and the martyrs of Liberty have suffered. We speak of Liberty as one thing, and virtue, wealth, knowledge, invention, national strength, and national independence as other things. But of all these' Liberty is the 1 conjure (pron., kŭn'jur), to produce magical effect. 2 vex the ear. What is the figure of speech. (See Def. 8.) 3 mission, essential purpose. 4 hereditary privileges, privileges attaching to rank or birth, and not enjoyed by the common people. 5 rhapsodist (rhapsody + ist), a rambling and excited declaimer. 6 As the sun, etc. Observe this finely sustained simile. Explain "lord of life." 7 But of all these, etc. Notice the rhetorical order. (See Def. 14.) Transpose into the direct order. (See Def. 13.) source, the mother, the necessary condition. She is to virtue what light is to color; to wealth, what sunshine is to grain; to knowledge, what eyes are to sight. She is the genius of invention, the brawn1 of national strength, the spirit of national independence. Where Liberty rises,2 there virtue grows, wealth increases, knowledge expands, invention multiplies human powers, and in strength and spirit the freer nation rises among her neighbors as Saul3 amid his brethren, - taller and fairer. Where Liberty sinks, there virtue fades, wealth diminishes, knowledge is forgotten, invention ceases, and empires once mighty in arms and arts become a helpless prey to freer barbarians! Liberty came to a race of slaves crouching under Egyptian whips, and led them forth from the house of bondage. She hardened them in the desert, and made of them a race of conquerors. The free spirit of the Mosaic law took their thinkers up to heights where they beheld the unity of God, and inspired their poets with strains that yet phrase the highest exaltations of thought. Liberty dawned on the Phenician coast, and ships passed the Pillars of Hercules to plow the unknown sea. She shed a partial light on Greece; and marble grew to shapes of ideal beauty, words became the instruments of subtlest thought, and against the scanty militia of free cities the 1 the brawn, etc.; i.e., the living 8 Saul. "From his shoulders and essence of national strength. What upward he was higher than any of is the figure of speech? (See Def. 3.) | the people" (1 Sam. ix. 3). 2 Where Liberty, etc. these two sentences the series of antitheses. Note in effective 4 Pillars of Hercules, i.e., peaks of the Atlas Mountains at the Strait of Gibraltar. countless hosts of the great king1 broke like surges against a rock. She cast her beams on the four-acre farms of Italian husbandmen; and, born of her strength, a power came forth that conquered the world. They glinted from shields of German warriors, and Augustus wept his legions.2 Out of the night that followed her eclipse, her slanting rays fell again on free cities: and a lost learning revived, modern civilization began, a new world was unveiled, — and, as Liberty grew, so grew art, wealth, power, knowledge, and refinement. In the history of every nation we may read the same truth. It was the strength born of Magna Charta that won Crecy and Agincourt. It was the revival of Liberty from the despotism of the Tudors that glorified the Elizabethan age. It was the spirit which brought a crowned tyrant to the block that planted here the seed of a mighty tree. It was the energy of ancient freedom that, the moment it had gained unity, made Spain the mightiest power of the world, only to fall to the lowest 5 1 the great king; i.e., the Persian king Xerxes, who with a vast host invaded Greece B.C. 480. 3 Magna Charta (kär'ta), literally, "the great charter," the written guaranty of certain rights and privileges assured to the English people by King John in the year 1215. 2 Augustus... legions. In the year 10 A.D., a Roman army in Germany, under Varrus, was cut to pieces by the Germans. For several 4 Crecy and Agincourt, names months after learning the fate of of two villages in France, the scenes his army, the emperor Augustus of English victories over the French, Cæsar gave himself up to transports-Crecy in 1346, and Agincourt in of grief, during which he frequently exclaimed, "Varrus, restore me my legions!" 1415. 5 crowned tyrant, Charles I. of England. (See Lesson 19.) depth of weakness when tyranny succeeded Liberty. See, in France, all intellectual vigor dying under the tyranny of the seventeenth century, to revive in splendor as Liberty awoke in the eighteenth, and on the enfranchisement of French peasants in the great Revolution, basing the wonderful strength that has in our time defied defeat. Shall we not trust her? HENRY GEORGE. 82.- Character of Lord Chatham. This keen analysis of the character of the elder Pitt, Lord Chatham (1708-78), was spoken in Parliament by Henry Grattan, one of the most eloquent orators in the British Parliament during the last century. The Secretary1 stood alone: modern degeneracy had not reached him. Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity; his august mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns 2 thought royalty so impaired in his presence that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow system of vicious politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories, sunk him to the vulgar level of the great; but overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, his ambition was fame. Without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made a venal age unanimous. 1 Secretary; i.e., who was British secretary of state in 1755. 2 one of his sovereigns; i.e., George the Third. 4 5 8 chi-can'er-y, political trickery and corruption. 4 object, i.e., loved object. France sunk beneath him. With one hand he smote the house of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy of England. The sight of his mind was infinite, and his schemes were to affect, not England, not the present age only, but Europe and posterity. Wonderful were the means by which these schemes were accomplished: always seasonable; always adequate; the suggestions of an understanding animated by ardor, and enlightened by prophecy. The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and indolent- those sensations which soften and allure and vulgarize were unknown to him. No domestic difficulties, no domestic weakness, reached him; but aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied by its intercourse, he came occasionally into our system to counsel and decide. A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so authoritative, astonished a corrupt age; and the treasury trembled at the name of PITT through all her classes of venality. Corruption imagined, indeed, that she found defects in this statesman, and talked much of the inconsistency of his glory, and much of the ruin of his victories; but the history of his country, and the calamities of the enemy, answered and refuted her. Nor were his political abilities his only talents. His eloquence was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous. Familiarly expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom, not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of Tully, it resembled sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music of the spheres. Like 1 Tully; i.e., Cicero, whose full name was Marcus Tullius Cicero. |