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254 the Revolution were imperishable. Its proclamation of the equal, natural, and unalienable rights of man have modified the political and social life of Europe. Its many great and vital reforms in the administration of justice, in the distribution of land, in the condition of the peasant, wrought the most beneficent changes in the lot of the people. If the humanitarian principles to which it gave birth were baptised in blood, we must remember that there has never yet in the world's history been a fresh incarnation of the idea without violent convulsions. The passage from a state of brutish degradation, corruption, and misery to freedom could not be accomplished without a mortal struggle. But as the earthquake, which lays cities in ruins, also lifts to the surface of the ocean beautiful islands, which presently a luxuriant vegetation will clothe, and where fresh young life will teem, so this great social upheaval, while destructive of much good as well as evil, raised a new social foundation for future generations to build on and complete.

Not only are the conquests of the Revolution imperishable, but the examples of heroism left by many of its children are among its priceless bequests. Among these examples we know of none greater than that given by Madame Roland in her life and death. Once, in a moment of discouragement while a prisoner, seeing in what her devotion to liberty had ended, she asked, "Was it worth while to have been born for this?" Yes, a thousand times yes, answers history. For in the long, painful process of education through which humanity is slowly advancing towards higher phases of development, the best of systems must remain waste sheets of paper but for the lives of noble men and women capable of transmuting abstractions