Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/83

 Rome regarded the Christians of that period as a most dangerous combination against not only the government, but (to use a doctrinaire phrase) against "society" itself. Tacitus—himself an aristocrat—regarded the aristocratic orders of his day as constituting society; and finding these orders to be no favourites with the Christians, he roundly accuses the latter of "hatred towards the human race," and describes them as followers of one Christ, who was the founder of a "deplorable and destructive superstition"! In the same way, the Bonapartes, the Thiers, and the Guizots of the present day represent their own plundering class as society, and describe such men as Ledru Rollin, Mazzini, Louis Blanc, Proudhon, &c., as enemies of all law and order—as enemies of family, property, and religion,—in short, as warring against "the very existence of society itself" (their own words), because they preferred the rights and happiness of the great majority to the usurpations of a criminal and contemptible minority. It is now an established fact—a fact as well attested as any in history—that the insurrection and bloody carnage in June, 1848, was preconcerted and with great pains elaborated by the friends of "law and order," in order to purge "society" of Red Republicanism and Socialism, or (to use their own phrase) pour en finir—i.e. to make a finish of the democratic and social republic by drowning it in the blood of its authors and most heroic defenders.

It is not so well known how the great fire originated in Rome, which Nero and his myrmidons charged upon the Christians. History had no historians for the poor of those days. There is but too much reason, however, to believe that the burning of Rome in Nero's time was as much the work of the friends of "law and order," and for a similar purpose, as the June insurrection was notoriously the work of the same description of gentry in Paris. Times and circumstances change, but not human nature; it is always the same, and will ever develop itself in the like way under like circumstances. Nero is said to have fiddled when Rome burned. The friends of "law and order," the defenders of "society," were never in brighter ecstacies than when Cavaignac announced the demolition, by shells and cannon, of the houses of the insurgents, and the massacre of their brave defenders. If setting fire to Rome, and reducing three-fourths of it to ashes, could have been made available for the destruction of the Christians, the aristocracy of that day would no more have scrupled at it than did Rostochin the burning of Moscow, Cavaignac the demolitions in Paris, or General Oudinot the bombardment of Rome. Aristocrats have never been aught but robbers since the birth of their order; and all history proves that they invariably become murderers, burners, devastators, and hirers of assassins the moment the people attempt to recover their own. It was so, most likely, in the burning of Rome. To this day, Nero himself is suspected of the deed, though we think it far more likely to have been the work of his aristocracy, with whom he was no favourite, because he made himself too familiar with the common people.

But whether the atrocity was Nero's work, or that of the aristocratic enemies of Christianity, it is certain the unfortunate Christians were made to bear the odium and penalties of it. Without