Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/99

Rh by himself, and only two hundred and forty thousand voters! Who sat so safe as the citizen king on his throne, surrounded by republican institutions! So confident was he, as the journals tell, that he bade a friend stop a day or two, "and see how I will put down the people!" For once, this shrewd calculator reckoned without his host. Well, we have seen this man, this citizen monarch, who married his children only to kings, rush from his place; his peers and his deputies were unavailing; his officeholders could not sustain him; his army "fraternized with the people;" and he, forgetful of his own children, ignominiously is hustled out of the kingdom, in a street cab, with nothing but a five-franc piece in his pocket. For the lesson thus taught, let us thank him most of all.

Men tell us it is too soon to rejoice; "perhaps the revolution will not hold;" "it will not last;" "the kings of Europe will put it down." When a sound, healthy child is born, the friends of the family congratulate the parents then; they do not wait till the child has grown up, and got a beard. Now this is a live child; it is well born in both senses, come of good parentage, and give signs of a good constitution. Let us rejoice at its birth, and not wait to see if it will grow up. Let us now baptize it in the crystal fountain of our own hope.

In a great revolution, there are always two things to be looked at, namely, the actions, and the ideas which produce the actions. The actions I will say little of; you have all read of them in the newspapers. Some of the actions were bad. It is not true that all at once the French have become angels. There are low and base men, who swarm in the lanes and alleys of Paris; for that great city also is like all capitals, girt about with a belt of misery, of vice, and of crime, eating into her painful loins. It was a bad thing to sack the Tuileries; to burn bridges, and chateaux, and railroad stations. Property is under the insurance of mankind, and the human race must pay in public for private depredations. It was a bad thing to kill men; the human race cannot make up that loss; only suffer and be penitent. I am sorry for these bad actions; but I am not surprised at them. You cannot burn down the poor dwelling of a widow in Boston, but some miserable man will steal pot or pan, in the confusion of the lire. How