Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/100

88 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