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All the realm shall be in common, and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass. And, when I am king, as king I will be, there shall be no money. All shall eat and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers and worship me, their lord." And when they bring before him the clerk of Chatham, guilty of the ability "to read and write and cast accounts," 'Away with him!" is the sentence; "hang him with his pen and inkhorn about his neck." Such was largely the aim of English chartism, of French socialism, such, too largely, of the Irish land league, and far worse, diabolically so, of Russian nihilism and American anarchism. Of the possibility of equal rights and unequal possessions, of the duty of reciprocity, of sacred obligations, it has no conception. "What might be a fair rent to pay?" asked Mr. Sheahey the other day of an Irish crowd. 'Nothing!" was the answer, received with loud laugher and uproarious applause.

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In the interval between the French revolution or convulsion of 1848 and the despotism of Louis Napoleon, France was covered with a network of secret associations, lacquered over with the name of "republican solidarity," pledged by horrid oaths to unlimited crime, even to the assassination of father or brother in obedience to orders. Under the "democratic" name it was an uprising against all authority and social order, that atheism and brutality might renew the orgies of 1793. "Fifty of us will leave Geneva for Montelimart," wrote Peysson Antoine to Staupany,

his dear brother of the Union; "we wish to massacre all the aristocrats and the black robes, and to burn all the châteaux; no quarter, no pity for those wretches and the monster Bonaparte; we must assassinate and poison them." Children imbibed the spirit with their mother's milk. A little fellow of six at Surgy waked at midnight and called for his father, but recollecting himself he added: "I will wait for him patiently, because he has gone to kill the rich citizens.” And a young mother at Tairnay had a way of asking her eighteen-months boy before a circle of socialists: “Tin, Tin, what is it they will do to the aristocrats?" The infant immediately drew his hand rapidly across his neck, to indicate that it was thus they would cut their throats, while the spectators applauded and the mother covered him with kisses. In December, 1851, flagrant with red caps and cravats these men had begun their bloody work. Their first acts were the pillage of local treasuries, the burning of public archives, registers and title deeds of property, abuse of women, the murder of priests, and sometimes torture of soldiers. "Here

is a proprietor!" shouted one as he fired a death shot at Bernard Maury; and one of their own number who wore a dress coat lost his life from his blunder. It was mercy to France and to mankind when they were crushed out by five hundred thousand soldiers, though wielded by the heavy hand of Louis Napoleon. Such a multitude is incapable of any government but a despotism.

Worse yet, if possible, is the present Russian upheaval. It is the struggle of a diabolic Samson,

stone blind.

Said one of their orators at Berne: "We nihilists say, no law, no religion - nihil." And their early apostle, Michael Bakunin, still more expressly: "The lie must be stamped out.

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The first lie is

God. The second lie is right. And when you have freed your minds of the fear of God and from that childish respect for right, then all the remaining chains. which bind you, and which are called science, civilization, property, marriage, morality, and justice, will drop asunder like threads." It is a notion worthy the joint elaboration of a bull and a tiger. And in a country where such is the aspiration of the reformatory class, if it be also true, as two oracles of Russian thought, Biélinsky and Wybourof, have declared, that the "people are at bottom atheistic," and that, "while there are churches and superstitions," there is not and "never has been a religion, except primitive polytheism ;" and if there be also, as has been deliberately charged, "a rotten, glittering aristocracy," at the top, then it becomes clear why Russia is incapable of any government but the traditional "despotism tempered by assassination."

Fortunately for us, such atrocity of doctrine and ferocity of spirit have, until quite recently, found no advocate in our country. But there has been not a little democracy and philanthrophy almost as superficial in principle. It reasons as though degradation were caused by illiteracy, the vicious are but the unfortunate, and the miseries of life are to be remedied by the outward reconstruction of society. Intemperance is to be

wiped out by prohibitory laws and woman's wrongs by woman suffrage. General distribution of property, a secure homestead, well-paid employment, good living, and protection and education enough for the enjoyment of them all behold the golden age come again! Indeed the great panacea which so able a man as Mr. Horace Greeley once advocated in the Tribune as destined to "banish want and all consequent degradation from the globe" was "industrial and household association," a scheme worthy of a place beside Jack Cade's "I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers."

Now Christianity comes to clear away all this surface jungle, to brush through the thin cobwebs of sentimentalism, to mow down the rank weeds of Fourierism, and cut up by the roots the upas tree of anarchism and nihilism, and to subsoil the ground for wholly another seed, for what John calls "the seed of God"— for the spirit of duty and benevolence, of self-restraint and reciprocity, of obedience, good will, and kindly relationship. It seizes fast the fact that no change of condition can make a change in the spirit; that a swine in the garden is much the same as a swine in the sty; that all men will not agree together like brothers though appareled in the same livery; that no environment will surround vice with peace, and no enlargement will bring freedom to the bond slave of appetite and passion; that license is not liberty, but the extinction of liberty; and especially that true freedom consists, not in the greatest exemption from restraints,

but in cheerful, spontaneous submission to those restraints which ought to control. The highest personal freedom is when every inclination is under the supreme dominion of reason and conscience; the highest civil and social freedom when every citizen is under a supreme, impartial, and beneficent authority. Christianity locates liberty for the man and for the state, not in the abrogation, but in the perfect ascendency of righteous law; that law obeyed not by a compelling force, but by a heartfelt accord. Its motto is: "Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteouness;" for "if the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." The conception as well as the possibility of its realization is the gift of the gospel.

But does some one say, they had the true notion in the ancient republics? They had no such thing. They knew of nothing but privileged classes and subjugated masses - the Spartan and the helot, the Athenian citizen and the serf, the Roman patron and the client, the republic and the tributary world — and the highest citizen ever the tool and, if need be, the victim of the State. No, neither the ancient republic, nor the northern barbarian, the free cities of the middle ages, nor chivalry, nor socialism, nor red republicanism, nor secessionism, ever rose to the conception of a freedom possible for every member of the community. That notion has its root in the gospel, in the equal value of all souls before God and in Christ, in the equal and fraternal relation of all souls to each

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