Page:Civil and Religious Liberty (Annie Besant).pdf/3



"! how many crimes are committed in thy name!" So exclaimed Madame Roland, one of the most heroic and most beautiful spirits of the great French Revolution, when above her glittered the keen knife of the guillotine, and below her glared the fierce faces of the maddened crowd, who were howling for her death. But Madame Roland, even as she spoke, bowed her fair head to the statue of Liberty which—pure, serene, majestic—rose beside the scaffold, and stood white and undefiled in the sunlight, while the mob seethed and tossed round its base. Madame Roland bent her brow before Liberty, even as the sad complaint passed her lips; for well that noble-hearted woman knew that the guillotine, by which she was to die, had not been raised in a night with the broken chains of Liberty, but had been slowly building up, during long centuries of tyranny, out of the mouldering skeletons of the thousands of victims of despotism and misrule. The taunt has been re-echoed ever since, and lovers of repression have changed its words and its meaning, and they have said what noble Madame Roland would never have said: "O Liberty, how many crimes are committed by thee, and because of thee!" They have never said, they have never cared to ask, how many crimes have been committed against Liberty in the past; how many crimes are daily committed against her in the England which we boast as free. They have never said, they have never cared to ask, whether the excesses which have, alas! disgraced revolutions, whether the bloodshed which has ofttimes stained crimson-red the fair, white, banner of Liberty, are not the natural and the necessary fruits, not of the freedom which is won, but of the tyranny which is crushed. Society keeps a number of its members uneducated and degraded; it houses them worse than brutes; it pays them so little that, if a man would not starve, he must toil all day, without time for