Part Four - Practise - section(2)

- On The Political Situation…John James Ingalls
- Against Capital Punishment…Robespierre
- Simplicity And Greatness…Fenelon
- Speech When Under Sentence Of Death…Robert Emmet

ON THE POLITICAL SITUATION

BY JOHN JAMES INGALLS

MR. PRESIDENT: Two portentous perils threaten the safety, if they do not endanger the existence of the republic.

The first of these is ignorant, debased, degraded, spurious, and sophisticated suffrage; suffrage contaminated by the feculent sewage of decaying nations; suffrage intimidated and suppressed in the South; suffrage impure and corrupt, apathetic and indifferent, in the great cities of the North, so that it is doubtful whether there has been for half a century a presidential election in this country that expressed the deliberate and intelligent judgment of the whole body of the American people.

In a newspaper interview a few months ago, in which I commented upon these conditions and alluded to the efforts of the bacilli doctors of politics, the bacteriologists of our system, who endeavor to cure the ills under which we suffer by their hypodermic injections of the lymph of independent non-partizanship and the Brown-Sequard elixir of civil-service reform, I said that'' the purification of politics'' by such methods as these was an '' iridescent dream.'' Remembering the cipher dispatches of 1877 and the attempted purchase of the electoral votes of many Southern States in that campaign, the forgery of the Morey letter in 1880, by which Garfield lost the votes of three states in the North, and the characterization and portraiture of Blaine and Cleveland and Harrison by their political adversaries, I added that "the Golden Rule and the Decalog had no place in American political campaigns."

It seems superfluous to explain, Mr. President, that in those utterances I was not inculcating a doctrine, but describing a condition. My statement was a statement of facts as I understood them, and not the announcement of an article of faith. But many reverend and eminent divines, many disinterested editors, many ingenuous orators, perverted those utterances into the personal advocacy of impurity in politics.

I do not complain, Mr. President. It was, as the world goes, legitimate political warfare; but it was an illustration of the truth that there ought to be purification in our politics, and that the Golden Rule and the Decalog ought to have a place in political campaigns. "Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you" is the supreme injunction, obligatory upon all. '' If thine enemy smite thee upon one cheek turn to him the other" is a sublime and lofty precept. But I take this occasion to observe that until it is more generally regarded than it has been or appears likely to be in the immediate future, if my political enemy smites me upon one cheek, instead of turning to him the other I shall smite him under the butt end of his left ear if I can. If this be political immorality, I am to be included among the unregenerated.

The election bill that was under consideration a few days ago is intended to deal with one part of the great evil to which I have alluded, but it is an imperfect, a partial, and an incomplete remedy. Violence is bad; but fraud is no better, and it is more dangerous because it is more insidious.

Burke said in one of those immortal orations that emptied the House of Commons, but which will be read with admiration so long as the English tongue shall endure, that when the laws of Great Britain were not strong enough to protect the humblest Hindoo upon the shores of the Ganges the nobleman was not safe in his castle upon the banks of the Thames. Sir, that lofty sentence is pregnant with admonition for us. There can be no repose, there can be no stable and permanent peace in this country under this government until it is just as safe for the black Republican to vote in Mississippi as it is for the white Democrat to vote in Kansas.

The other evil, Mr. President, the second to which I adverted as threatening the safety if it does not endanger the existence of the republic, is the tyranny of combined, concentrated, centralized, and incorporated capital. And the people are considering this great problem now. The conscience of the nation is shocked at the injustice of modern society. The moral sentiment of mankind has been aroused at the unequal distribution of wealth, at the unequal diffusion of the burdens, the benefits, and the privileges of society.

At the beginning of our second century the American people have become profoundly conscious that the ballot is not the panacea for all the evils that afflict humanity; that it has not abolished poverty nor prevented injustice. They have discovered that political equality does not result in social fraternity j that under a democracy the concentration of greater political power in fewer hands, the accumulation and aggregation of greater amounts of wealth in individuals, are more possible than under a monarchy; and that there is a tyranny which is more fatal than the tyranny of kings.

George Washington, the first President of the Republic, at the close of his life in 1799 had the largest private fortune in the United States of America. Much of this came by inheritance, but the Father of his Country, in addition to his other virtues, shining and illustrious, was a very prudent, sagacious, thrifty, and forehanded man. He knew a good thing when he saw it a great way off. He had a keen eye for the main chance. As a surveyor in his youth he obtained knowledge that enabled him to make exceedingly valuable locations upon the public domain. The establishment of the national capital in the immediate vicinity of his patrimonial possessions did not diminish their value. He was a just debtor, but he was an exact if not an exacting creditor. And so it came to pass that when he died he was, to use the expressive phraseology of the day, the richest man in the country.

At this time, ninety years afterward, it is not without interest to know that the entire aggregate and sum of his earthly possessions, his estate, real, personal, and mixed, Mount Vernon and his lands along the Kanawha and the Ohio, slaves, securities, all of his belongings, reached the sum total of between $800,000 and $900,000. This was less than a century ago, and it is within bounds to say that at this time there are many scores of men, of estates, and of corporations in this country whose annual income exceed, and there has been one man whose monthly revenue since that period exceeded, the entire accumulations of the wealthiest citizen of the United States at the end of the last century.

At that period the social condition of the United States was one of practical equality. The statistics of the census of 1800 are incomplete and fragmentary, but the population of the Union was about 5,300,000, and the estimated wealth of the country was between $3,000,000,000 and $4,000,000,000. There was not a millionaire, and there was not a tramp nor a pauper, so far as we know, in the country, except such, as had been made so by infirmity, or disease, or inevitable calamity. A multitude of small farmers contentedly tilled the soil. Upon the coast a race of fishermen and sailors, owning the craft that they sailed, wrested their substance from the stormy seas. Labor was the rule and luxury the exception. The great mass of the people lived upon the products of the farms that they cultivated. They spun and wove and manufactured their clothing from flax and from wool. Commerce and handicrafts afforded honorable competence. The prayer of Agur was apparently realized. There was neither poverty nor riches. "Wealth was uniformly diffused, and none were condemned to hopeless penury and dependence. Less than four per cent, of the entire population lived in towns, and there were but four cities whose population exceeded 10,000 persons. "Westward to the Pacific lay the fertile solitudes of an unexplored continent, its resources undeveloped and unsuspected. The dreams of Utopia seemed about to be fulfilled the wide, the universal diffusion of civil, political, and personal rights among the great body of the people, accompanied by efficient and vigorous guaranties for the safety of life, the protection of property, and the preservation of liberty.

Since that time, Mr. President, the growth in wealth and numbers in this country has had no precedent in the building of nations. The genius of the people, stimulated to prodigious activity by freedom, by individualism, by universal education, has subjugated the desert and abolished the frontier. The laboring capacity of every inhabitant of this planet has been duplicated by machinery. In Massachusetts alone we are told that its engines are equivalent to the labor of one hundred million men. We now perform one third of the world's mining, one quarter of its manufacturing, one fifth of its farming, and we possess one sixth part of its entire accumulated wealth.

The Anglo-Saxon, Mr. President, is not by nature or instinct an anarchist, a socialist, a nihilist, or a communist. He does not desire the repudiation of debts, public or private, and he does not favor the forcible redistribution of property. He came to this continent, as he has gone everywhere else on the face of the earth, with a purpose. The 40,000 English colonists who came to this country between 1620 and 1650 formed the most significant, the most formidable migration that has ever occurred upon this globe since time began. They brought with them social and political ideas, novel in their application, of inconceivable energy and power, the home, the family, the State, individualism, the right of personal effort, freedom of conscience, an indomitable love of liberty and justice, a genius for self-government, an unrivaled capacity for conquest, but preferring charters to the sword, and they have been inexorable and relentless in the accomplishment of their designs. They were fatigued with caste and privilege and prerogative. They were tired of monarchs, and so, upon the bleak and inhospitable shores of New England they decreed the sovereignty of the people, and there they builded "a church without a bishop, and a state without a king."

The result of that experiment, Mr. President, has been ostensibly successful. Under the operation of those great forces, after two hundred and seventy years, this country exhibits a peaceful triumph over many subdued nationalities, through a government automatic in its functions and sustained by no power but the invisible majesty of law. With swift and constant communication by lines of steam transportation by land and lake and sea, with telegraphs extending their nervous reticulations from State to State, the remotest members of this gigantic republic are animated by a vitality as vigorous as that which throbs at its mighty heart, and it is through the quickened intelligence that has been communicated by those ideas that these conditions, which have been fatal to other nations, have become the pillars of our strength and the bulwarks of our safety.

Mr. President, if time and space signified now what they did when independence was declared, the United States could not exist under one government. It would not be possible to secure unity of purpose or identity of interest between communities separated by such barriers and obstacles as Maine and California. But time and distance are relative terms, and, under the operations of these forces, this continent has dwindled to a span. It is not as far from Boston to San Francisco to-day as it was from Boston to Baltimore in 1791; and as the world has shrunk, life has expanded. For all the purposes for which existence is valuable in this world for comfort, for convenience, for opportunity, for intelligence, for power of locomotion, and superiority to the accidents and the fatalities of nature the fewest in years among us, Mr. President, has lived longer and has lived more worthily than Methuselah in all his stagnant centuries.

When the Atlantic cable was completed, it was not merely that a wire, finer by comparison than the gossamer of morning, had sunk to its path along the peaks and the plateaus of the deep, but the earth instantaneously grew smaller by the breadth of the Atlantic. A new volume in the history of the world was opened. The to-morrow of Europe flashed upon the yesterday of America. Time, up to the period when this experiment commenced on this continent, yielded its treasures grudgingly and with reluctance. The centuries crept from improvement to improvement with tardy and sluggish steps, as if nature were unwilling to acknowledge the mastery of man. The great inventions of glass, of gunpowder, of printing, and the mariner's compass consumed a thousand years, but as the great experiment upon this continent has proceeded, the ancient law of progress has been disregarded, and the mind is bewildered by the stupendous results of its marvelous achievements.

The application of steam to locomotion on land and sea, the cotton-gin, electric illumination and telegraphy, the cylinder printing-press, the sewing-machine, the photographic art, tubular and suspension bridges, the telephone, the spectroscope, and the myriad forms of new applications of science to health and domestic comfort, to the arts of peace and war, have alone rendered democracy possible. The steam-engine emancipated millions from the slavery of daily toil and left them at liberty to pursue a higher range of effort; labor has become more remunerative, and the flood of wealth has raised the poor to comfort and the middle classes to affluence. With prosperity has attended leisure, books, travel; the masses have been provided with schools, and the range of mental inquiry has become wider and more daring. The sewing-machine does the work of a hundred hands, and gives rest and hope to weary lives. Farming, as my distinguished friend from New York [Mr. Evarts] once said, has become a " sedentary occupation." The reaper no longer swings his sickle in midsummer fields through the yellowish grain, followed by those who gather the wheat and the tares, but he rides in a vehicle, protected from the meridian sun, accomplishing in comfort in a single hour the former labors of a day.

By these and other emancipating devices of society the laborer and the artisan acquire the means of study and recreation. They provide their children with better opportunities than they possessed. Emerging from the obscure degradation to which they have been consigned by monarchies, they have assumed the leadership in politics and society. The governed have become the governors; the subjects have become the kings. They have formed states; they have invented political systems; they have made laws; they have established literatures; and it is not true, Mr. President, in one sense, that during this extraordinary period the rich have grown richer and the poor have grown poorer. There has never been a time, since the angel stood with the flaming sword before the gates of Eden, when the dollar of invested capital paid as low a return in interest as it does to-day; nor has there been an hour when the dollar that is earned by the laboring man would buy so much of everything that is essential for the welfare of himself and his family as it will to-day.

Mr. President, monopolies and corporations, however strong they may be, can not permanently enslave such a people. They have given too many convincing proofs of their capacity for self-government. They have made too many incredible sacrifices for this great system, which has been builded and established here, to allow it to be overthrown. They will submit to no dictation. The people of the country that I represent have lost their reverence for gold. They have no longer any superstition about coin. Notwithstanding the declarations of the mono-metallists; notwithstanding the assaults that have been made by those who are in favor of still further increasing the value of the standard by which their possessions are measured, they know that money is neither wealth, nor capital, nor value, and that it is merely the creation of the law by which all these are estimated and measured.

We speak, sir, about the volume of money, and about its relation to the wealth and capital of the country. Let me ask you, sir, for a moment, what would occur if the circulating medium were to be destroyed ? Suppose that the gold and silver were to be withdrawn suddenly from circulation and melted up into bars and ingots and buried in the earth from which they were taken. Suppose that all the paper money, silver certificates, gold certificates, national bank notes, treasury notes, were stacked in one mass at the end of the treasury building and the torch applied to them, and they were to be destroyed by fire, and their ashes scattered, like the ashes of Wyclif, upon the Potomac, to be spread abroad, wide as its waters be.

What would be the effect? Would not this country be worth exactly as much as it is to-day ? Would there not be just as many acres of land, as many houses, as many farms, as many days of labor, as much improved and unimproved merchandise, and as much property as there is to-day ? The result would be that commerce would languish, the sails of the ships would be furled in the harbors, the great trains would cease to run to and fro on their errands, trade would be reduced to barter, and, the people finding their energies languishing, civilization itself would droop, and we should be reduced to the condition of the nomadic wanderers upon the primeval plains.

Suppose, on the other hand, that instead of being destroyed, all the money in this country were to be put in the possession of a single man gold, and paper, and silver and he were to be moored in mid-Atlantic upon a raft with his great hoard, or to be stationed in the middle of Sahara's desert without food to nourish, or shelter to cover, or the means of transportation to get away. Who would be the richest man, the possessor of the gigantic treasure or the humblest settler upon the plains of the West, with a dugout to shelter him, and with corn meal and water enough for his daily bread?

Doubtless, Mr. President, you search the Scriptures daily, and are therefore familiar with the story of those depraved politicians of Judea who sought to entangle the Master in His talk, by asking Him if it were lawful to pay tribute to Caesar or not. He, perceiving the purpose that they had in view, said unto them, "Show me the tribute money"; and they brought him a penny. He said, ' * Whose is this image and superscription ?'' and they replied, '' Caesar's "; and He said, l i Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's."

I hold, Mr. President, between my thumb and finger, a silver denarius, or "penny," of that ancient time perhaps the identical coin that was brought by the hypocritical Herodian bearing the image and superscription of Caesar. It has been money for more than twenty centuries. It was money when Jesus walked the waves and in the tragic hour at Gethsemane. Imperial Caesar is "dead and turned to clay." He has yielded to a mightier conqueror, and his eagles, his ensigns, and his trophies are indistinguishable dust. His triumphs and his victories are a schoolboy's tale. Rome herself is but a memory. Her marble porticos and temples and palaces are in ruins. The sluggish monk and the lazy Roman lazzaroni haunt the Senate House and the Coliseum, and the derisive owl wakes the echoes of the voiceless Forum. But this little contemporary disk of silver is money still, because it bears the image and superscription of Caesar. And, sir, it will continue to be money for twenty centuries more, should it resist so long the corroding canker and the gnawing tooth of time. But if one of these pages should take this coin to the railway track, as boys sometimes do, and allow the train to pass over it, in one single instant its function would be destroyed. It would contain as many grains of silver as before, but it would be money no longer, because the image and superscription of Caesar had disappeared.

Mr. President, money is the creation of law, and the American people have learned that lesson, and they are indifferent to the assaults, they are indifferent to the arguments, they are indifferent to the aspersions which are cast upon them for demanding that the law of the United States shall place the image and superscription of Caesar upon silver enough and gold enough and paper enough to enable them to transact without embarrassment, without hindrance, without delay, and without impoverishment their daily business affairs, and that shall give them a measure of values that will not make their earnings and their belongings the sport and the prey of speculators.

Mr. President, this contest can have but one issue. The experiment that has begun will not fail. It is useless to deny that many irregularities have been tolerated here; that many crimes have been committed in the sacred name of liberty; that our public affairs have been scandalous episodes to which every patriotic heart reverts with distress; that there have been envy and jealousy in high places; that there have been treacherous and lying platforms; that there have been shallow compromises and degrading concessions to popular errors; but, amid all these disturbances, amid all these contests, amid all these inexplicable aberrations, the path of the nation has been steadily onward.

At the beginning of our second century we have entered upon a new social and political movement whose results can not be predicted, but which are certain to be infinitely momentous. That the progress will be upward I have no doubt. Through the long and desolate tract of history, through the seemingly aimless struggles, the random gro-pings of humanity, the turbulent chaos of wrong, injustice, crime, doubt, want, and wretchedness, the dungeon and the block, the inquisition and the stake, the trepidations of the oppressed, the bloody exultations and triumph of tyrants, •

The uplifted ax, the agonizing wheel,
Luke's iron crown and Damien's bed of steel,

the tendency has been toward the light. Out of every conflict some man or sect or nation has emerged with higher privileges, greater opportunities, purer religion, broader liberty, and greater capacity for happiness; and out of this conflict in which we are now engaged I am confident finally will come liberty, justice, equality; the continental unity of the American republic, the social fraternity and the industrial independence of the American people.

AGAINST CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

BY ROBESPIERRE

The news having been brought to Athens that Athenian citizens had been sentenced to death in the town of Argos, the people hastened to the temples to implore the gods to divert the Athenians from thoughts so cruel and so baleful. I come to urge, not the gods, but the legislators, who should be the organ and the interpreters of the eternal laws the Divinity has dictated to men, to strike from the French code the laws of blood, which command judicial murder which are repugnant to their habits and their new Constitution. I will prove to them: First, that the death penalty is essentially unjust; secondly, that it is not the most repressive of punishments, and that it increases crimes much more than it prevents them.

Outside of civil society, let an inveterate enemy attempt to take my life, or, twenty times repulsed, let him again return to devastate the field my hands have cultivated. Inasmuch as I can only oppose my individual strength to his, I must perish or I must kill him, and the law of natural defense justifies and approves me. But in society, when the strength of all is armed against one single individual, What principle of justice can authorize it to put him to death ? "What necessity can there be to absolve it ? A conqueror who causes the death of his captive enemies is called a barbarian! A man who causes a child that he can disarm and punish, to be strangled, appears to us a monster! A prisoner that society convicts is at the utmost to that society but a vanquished, powerless, and harmless enemy. He is before it weaker than a child before a full-grown man.

Therefore, in the eyes of truth and justice, these death scenes which it orders with so much preparation are but cowardly assassinations solemn crimes committed, not by individuals, but by entire nations, with due legal forms. However cruel, however extravagant these laws may be, be not astonished. They are the handiwork of a few tyrants; they are the chains with which they load down humankind; they are the arms with which they subjugate them! They were written in blood! '' It is not permitted to put to death a Roman citizen" this was the law that the people had adopted; but Sulla conquered and said: "All those who have borne arms against me deserve death." Octavius, and the companions of his misdeeds, confirmed this law.

Under Tiberius, to have praised Brutus was a crime worthy of death. Caligula sentenced to death those who were sacrilegious enough to disrobe before the image of the emperor. When tyranny had invented the crimes of lese-majesté (which might be either trivial acts or heroic deeds), he who should have dared to think that they could merit a lighter penalty than death would himself have been held guilty of lèse-majesté.

When fanaticism, born of the monstrous union of ignorance and despotism, in its turn invented the crimes of lese-majesté against God when it thought, in its frenzy, to avenge God himself was it not obliged to offer him blood and to place him on the level of the monsters who called themselves his images? The death penalty is necessary, say the partizans of antiquated and barbarous loutine! Without it there is no restraint strong enough against crime. Who has told you so? Have you reckoned with all the springs through which penal laws can act upon human sensibility? Alas! before death how much physical and moral suffering can not man endure!

The wish to live gives way to pride, the most imperious of all the passions which dominate the heart of man. The most terrible punishment for social man is opprobrium; it is the overwhelming evidence of public execration. When the legislator can strike the citizens in so many places and in so many ways, how can he believe himself reduced to employ the death penalty? Punishments are not made to torture the guilty, but to prevent crime from fear of incurring them.

The legislator who prefers death and atrocious punishments to the mildest means within his power outrages public delicacy, and deadens the moral sentiment of the people he governs, in a way similar to that in which an awkward teacher brutalizes and degrades the mind of his pupil by the frequency of cruel chastisements. In the end, he wears and weakens the springs of government, in trying to bend them with greater force.

The legislator who establishes such a penalty renounces the wholesome principle that the most efficacious method of repressing crimes is to adapt the punishments to the character of the various passions which produce them, and to punish them, so to speak, by their own selves. He confounds all ideas, he disturbs all connections, and opposes openly the object of all penal laws.

The penalty of death is necessary, you say? If such is the case, why have several nations been able to do without it? By what fatality have these nations been the wisest, the happiest, and the freest? If the death penalty is the proper way to prevent great crimes, it must then be that they were rarer with these people who have adopted and extended it. Now, the contrary is exactly the case. See Japan: nowhere are the death penalty and extreme punishments so frequent; nowhere are crimes so frequent and atrocious. It is as if the Japanese tried to dispute in ferocity the barbarous laws which outrage and irritate them. The republics of Greece, where punishments were moderate, where the death penalty was either very rare or absolutely unknown did they produce more crimes or less virtues than the countries governed by the laws of blood? Do you believe that Rome was more disgraced by heinous crimes when, in the days of her glory, the Porcian Law had abolished the severe punishments applied by the kings and by the decemvirs, than she was under Sulla, who had revived them, and under the emperors who exerted their rigor to a degree in keeping with their infamous tyranny? Has Russia suffered any upheaval since the despot who governs her suppressed entirely the death penalty, as if he wished to expiate by that act of humanity and philosophy the crime of keeping millions of men under the yoke of absolute power?

Listen to the voice of justice and of reason; it cries to us that human judgments are never certain enough to warrant society in giving death to a man convicted by other men liable to error. Had you imagined the most perfect judicial system; had you found the most upright and enlightened judges there will always remain some room for error or prejudice. Why interdict to yourselves the means of reparation? Why condemn yourself to powerlessness to help oppressed innocence? What good can come of the sterile regrets, these illusory reparations you grant to a vain shade, to insensible ashes? They are the sad testimonials of the barbarous temerity of your penal laws. To rob the man of the possibility of expiating his crime by his repentance or by acts of virtue; to close to him without mercy- every return toward a proper life, and his own esteem; to hasten his descent, as it were, into the grave still covered with the recent blotch of his crime is in my eyes the most horrible refinement of cruelty.

The first duty of the lawmaker is to form and to conserve public morals, as the source of all liberty, the source of all social happiness. When, to attain some special aim, he loses sight of this general and essential object, he commits the grossest and most fatal of errors. Therefore the laws must ever present to the people the purest model of justice and of reason. If, in lieu of this puissant severity, of this moderate calmness which should characterize them, they replace it by anger and vengeance; if they cause human blood to flow which they can prevent which they have no right to spill; if they exhibit to the eyes of the people cruel scenes and corpses bruised by tortures then they change in the hearts of the citizens all ideas of the just and of the unjust; they cause to germinate in the bosom of society ferocious prejudices which in their turn again produce others. Man is no longer for man an object so sacred as before. One has a lower idea of his dignity when public authority makes light of his life. The idea of the murder fills us with less horror when the law itself sets the example and provides the spectacle; the horror of the crime diminishes from the time law no longer punishes it except by another crime. Have a care not to confound the efficiency of punishment with excess of severity; the one is absolutely opposed to the other. Everything favors moderate laws; everything conspires against cruel laws. It has been remarked that in free countries crimes are of rarer occurrence and the penal laws lighter; all ideas are linked together. Free countries are those in which the rights of man are respected, and where, consequently, the laws are just. "Where they offend humanity by an excess of rigor, it is a proof that there the dignity of man is not known and that the dignity of the citizen does not exist. It is a proof that the legislator is but a master who commands slaves and punishes them mercilessly according to his whim.

SIMPLICITY AND GREATNESS

BY FENELON

There is a simplicity that is a defect, and a simplicity that is a virtue. Simplicity may be a want of discernment. "When we speak of a person as simple, we may mean that he is credulous and perhaps vulgar. The simplicity that is a virtue is something sublime every one loves and admires it; but it is difficult to say exactly what this virtue is.

Simplicity is an uprightness of soul that has no reference to self; it is different from sincerity, and it is a still higher virtue. We see many people who are sincere, without being simple; they only wish to pass for what they are, and they are unwilling to appear what they are not; they are always thinking of themselves, measuring their words, and recalling their thoughts, and renewing their actions, from the fear that they have done too much or too little. These persons are sincere, but they are not simple; they are not at ease with others and others are not at ease with them; they are not free, ingenuous, natural; we prefer people who are less correct, less perfect, and who are less artificial. This is the decision of man, and it is the judgment of God, who would not have us so occupied with ourselves, and thus, as it were, always arranging our features in a mirror.

To be wholly occupied with others, never to look within, is the state of blindness of those who are entirely engrossed by what is present and addressed to their senses; this is the very reverse of simplicity. To be absorbed in self in whatever engages us, whether we are laboring for our fellow beings or for God to be wise in our own eyes, reserved, and full of ourselves, troubled at the least thing that disturbs our self-complacency, is the opposite extreme. This is false wisdom, which, with all its glory, is but little less absurd than that folly which pursues only pleasure. The one is intoxicated with all that it sees around, the other with all that it imagines it has within; but it is delirium in both. To be absorbed in the contemplation of our own minds is really worse than to be engrossed by outward things, because it appears like wisdom and yet is not; we do not think of curing it; we pride ourselves upon it; we approve of it; it gives us an unnatural strength; it is a sort of frenzy; we are not conscious of it; we are dying, and we think ourselves in health.

Simplicity consists in a just medium, in which we are neither too much excited, nor too composed. The soul is not carried away by outward things, so that it cannot make all necessary reflections; neither does it make those continual references to self, that a jealous sense of its own excellence multiplies to infinity. That, freedom of the soul, which looks straight onward in its path, losing no time to reason upon its steps, to study them, or to contemplate those that it has already taken, is true simplicity.

The first step in the progress of the soul is disengagement from outward things, that it may enter into itself, and contemplate its true interests; this is a wise self-love. The second is, to join to this the idea of God whom it fears; this is the feeble beginning of true wisdom, but the soul is still fixed upon itself: it is afraid that it does not fear God enough; it is still thinking of itself. These anxieties about ourselves are far removed from that peace and liberty which a true and simple love inspires; but it is not yet time for this. The soul must pass through this trouble; this operation of the spirit of God in our hearts comes to us gradually; we approach step by step to this simplicity. In the third and last state, we begin to think of God more frequently, we think of ourselves less, and insensibly we lose ourselves in Him.

The more gentle and docile the soul is, the more it advances in this simplicity. It does not become blind to its own defects, and unconscious of its imperfections; it is more than ever sensible of them; it feels an horror of the slightest sin; it seems more than clearly its own corruption. This sensibility does not arise from dwelling upon itself, but by the light from the presence of God, we see how far removed we are from infinite purity.

Thus simplicity is free in its course, since it makes no preparation; but it can only belong to the soul that is purified by a true penitence. It must be the fruit of a perfect renunciation of self, and an unreserved love of God. But tho they, who become penitents, and tear themselves from the vanities of the world, make self the objects of thought, yet they must avoid an excessive and unquiet occupation with themselves, such as would trouble, and embarrass, and retard them in their progress. Dwelling too much upon self produces in weak minds useless scruples and superstition, and in stronger minds a presumptuous wisdom. Both are contrary to true simplicity, which is free and direct, and gives itself up, without reserve and with a generous self-forgetfulness, to the Father of spirits. How free, how intrepid are the motions, how glorious the progress that the soul makes, when delivered from all low, and interested, and unquiet cares!

If we desire that our friends be simple and free with us, disencumbered of self in their intimacy with us, will it not please God, who is our truest friend, that we should surrender our souls to Him, without fear or reserve, in that holy and sweet communion with Himself which He allows us? It is this simplicity which is the perfection of the true children of God. This is the end that we must have in view, and to which we must be continually advancing.

This deliverance of the soul from all useless, and selfish, and unquiet cares, brings to it a peace and freedom that are unspeakable; this is true simplicity. It is easy to perceive, at the first glance, how glorious it is; but experience alone can make us comprehend the enlargement of heart that it produces. We are then like a child in the arms of its parent; we wish nothing more; we fear nothing; we yield ourselves up to this pure attachment; we are not anxious about what others think of us; all our motions are free, graceful, and happy. "We do not judge ourselves, and we do not fear to be judged. Let us strive after this lovely simplicity; let us seek the path that leads to it. The further we are from it, the more we must hasten our steps toward it. Very far from being simple, most Christians are not even sincere. They are not only disingenuous, but they are false, and they dissemble with their neighbor, with God, and with themselves. They practise a thousand little arts that indirectly distort the truth. Alas! every man is a liar; those even who are naturally upright, sincere, and ingenuous, and who are what is called simple and natural, still have this jealous and sensitive reference to self in everything, which secretly nourishes pride and prevents that true simplicity which is the renunciation and perfect oblivion of self.

But it will be said, How can I help being occupied with myself ? A crowd of selfish fears troubles me, and tyrannize over my mind, and excite a lively sensibility. The principal means to cure this is to yield yourself up sincerely to God; to place all your interests, pleasures, and reputation in His hands; to receive all the sufferings that He may inflict upon you in this scene of humiliation, as trials and tests of your love to Him, neither to fear the scrutiny, nor to avoid the censure of mankind. This state of willing acquiescence produces true liberty, and this liberty brings perfect simplicity. A soul that is liberated from the little earthly interests of self-love becomes confiding, and moves straight onward, and its views expand even to infinity, just in proportion as its forgetfulness of self increases, and its peace is profound even in the midst of trouble.

I have already said that the opinion of the world conforms to the judgment of God upon this noble simplicity. The world admires, even in its votaries, the free and easy manners of a person who has lost sight of self. But the simplicity, which is produced by a devotion to external things, still more vain than self, is not the true simplicity; it is only an image of it, and cannot represent its greatness. They who cannot find the substance, pursue the shadow; and shadow as it is, it has a charm, for it has some resemblance to the reality that they have lost. A person full of defects, who does not attempt to hide them, who does not seek to dazzle, who does not affect either talents or virtue, who does not appear to think of himself more than of others, but to have lost sight of this self of which we are so jealous, pleases greatly, in spite of his defects. This false simplicity is taken for the true. On the contrary, a person full of talents, of virtues, and of exterior graces, if he appear artificial, if he be thinking of himself, if he affect the very best things, is a tedious and wearisome companion that no one likes.

Nothing, then, we grant, is more lovely and grand than simplicity. But some will say, Must we never think of self? We need not practise this constraint; in trying to be simple, we may lose simplicity. What, then, must we do 1 Make no rule about it, but be satisfied that you affect nothing. When you are disposed to speak of yourself from vanity, you can only repress this strong desire by thinking of God, or of what you are called upon by Him to do. Simplicity does not consist in false shame or false modesty, any more than in pride or vainglory. When vanity would lead to egotism, we have only to turn from self; when, on the contrary, there is a necessity of speaking of ourselves, we must not reason too much about it: we must look straight at the end. But what will they think of me? They will think I am boasting; I shall be suspected in speaking so freely of my own concerns. None of these unquiet reflections should trouble us for one moment. Let us speak freely, ingenuously, and simply of ourselves when we are called upon to speak. It is thus that St. Paul spoke often in his Epistles. What true greatness there is in speaking with simplicity of one's self!

Vainglory is sometimes hidden under an air of modesty and reserve. People do not wish to proclaim their own merit, but they would be very glad that others should discover it. They would have the reputation both of virtue and of the desire to hide it.

As to the matter of speaking against ourselves, I do not either 'blame or recommend it. "When it arises from true simplicity, and that hatred with which God inspires us for our sins, it is admirable, and thus I regard it in many holy men. But usually the surest and most simple way is not to speak unnecessarily of one's self, either good or evil. Self-love often prefers abuse to oblivion and silence; and when we have often spoken ill of ourselves, we are quite ready to be reconciled, just like angry lovers, who, after a quarrel, redouble their devotion to each other.

This simplicity is manifested in the exterior. As the mind is freed from this idea of self, we act more naturally, all art ceases, and we act rightly without thinking of what we are doing, by a sort of directness of purpose that is inexplicable to those who have no experience of it. To some we may appear less simple than those who have a more grave and practised manner; but these are people of bad taste, who take the affectation of modesty for modesty itself, and who have no knowledge of true simplicity. This true simplicity has sometimes a careless and irregular appearance, but it has the charm of truth and candor, and sheds around it I know not what of purity and innocence, of cheerfulness and peace; a loveliness that wins us when we see it intimately and with pure eyes.

How desirable is this simplicity! who will give it to me? I will quit all else to obtain it, for it is the pearl of great price.

SPEECH WHEN UNDER SENTENCE OF DEATH

BY ROBERT EMMET

My Lords, what have I to say why sentence of death should not be pronounced on me according to law ? I have nothing to say that can alter your predetermination, nor that it will become me to say with any view to the mitigation of that sentence which you are here to pronounce and I must abide by. But I have that to say which interests me more than life and which you have labored (as was necessarily your office in the present circumstances of this oppressed country) to destroy. I have much to say why my reputation should be rescued from the load of false accusation and calumny which has been heaped upon it. I do not imagine that, seated where you are, your minds can be so free from impurity as to receive the least impression from what I am going to utter I have no hopes that I can anchor my character in the breast of a court constituted and trammeled as this is I only wish, and it is the utmost I expect, that your lordships may suffer it to •float down your memories, untainted by the foul breath of prejudice, until it finds some more hospitable harbor to shelter it from the storm by which it is at present buffeted.

Was I only to suffer death after being adjudged guilty by your tribunal, I should bow in silence and meet the fate that awaits me without a murmur; but the sentence of law which delivers my body to the executioner will, through the ministry of that law, labor in its own vindication to consign my character to obloquy for there must be guilt somewhere: whether in the sentence of the court or in the catastrophe, posterity must determine.

A man in my situation, my lords, has not only to encounter the difficulties of fortune and the force of power over minds which it has corrupted or subjugated, but the difficulties of established prejudice: the man dies, but his memory lives. That mine may not perish, that it may live in the respect of my countrymen, I seize upon this opportunity to vindicate myself from some of the charges alleged against me.

When my spirit shall be wafted to a more friendly port; when my shade shall have joined the bands of those martyred heroes who have shed their blood on the scaffold and in the field in defense of their country and of virtue, this is my hope: I wish that my memory and name may animate those who survive me, while I look down with complacency on the destruction of that perfidious government which up holds its dominion by blasphemy of the Most High which displays its power over man as over the beasts of the forest; which sets man upon his brother and lifts his hand in the name of God against the throat of his fellow who believes or doubts a little more or a little less than the government standard a government which is steeled to barbarity by the cries of the orphans and the tears of the widows which it has made

[Here Lord Norbury interrupted Mr. Emmet, saying that the mean and wicked enthusiasts who felt as he did were not equal to the accomplishment of their wild designs. ]

I appeal to the immaculate God I swear by the throne of heaven, before which I must shortly appear by the blood of the murdered patriots who have gone before me that my conduct has been, through all this peril and all my purposes, governed only by the convictions which I have uttered, and by no other view than that of their cure and the emancipation of my country from the superhuman oppression under which she has so long and too patiently travailed; and that I confidently and assuredly hope that, wild and chimerical as it may appear, there is still union and strength in Ireland to accomplish this noble enterprise. Of this I speak with the confidence of intimate knowledge and with the consolation that appertains to that confidence. Think not, my lord, I say this for the petty gratification of giving you a transitory uneasiness; a man who never yet raised his voice to assert a lie will not hazard his character with posterity by asserting a falsehood on a subject so important to his country and on an occasion like this. Yes, my lords, a man who does not wish to have his epitaph written until his country is liberated will not leave a weapon in the power of envy, nor a pretense to impeach the probity which he means to preserve even in the grave to which tyranny consigns him.

[Here he was again interrupted by the court.]

Again I say, that what I have spoken was not intended for your lordship, whose situation I commiserate rather than envy my expressions were for my countrymen; if there is a true Irishman present, let my last words cheer him in the hour of his affliction.

[Here he was again interrupted. Lord Norbury said he did not sit there to hear treason.]

I have always understood it to be the duty of a judge, when a prisoner has been convicted, to pronounce the sentence of the law; I have also understood that judges sometimes think it their duty to hear with patience and to speak with humanity; to exhort the victim of the laws and to offer with tender benignity his opinions of the motives by which he was actuated in the crime of which he had been adjudged guilty: that a judge has thought it his duty so to have done, I have no doubt but where is the boasted freedom of your institutions, where is the vaunted impartiality, clemency, and mildness of your courts of justice, if an unfortunate prisoner, whom your policy, and not pure justice, is about to deliver into the hands of the executioner, is not suffered to explain his motives sincerely and truly, and to vindicate the principles by which he was actuated?

My lords, it may be a part of the system of angry justice to bow a man's mind by humiliation to the purposed ignominy of the scaffold; but worse to me than the purposed shame or the scaffold's terrors would be the shame of such foul and unfounded imputations as have been laid against me in this court. You, my lord, are a judge; I am the supposed culprit; I am a man, you are a man also; by a revolution of power we might change places, tho we never could change characters. If I stand at the bar of this court and dare not vindicate my character, what a farce is your justice? If I stand at this bar and dare not vindicate my character, how dare you calumniate it? Does the sentence of death which your unhallowed policy inflicts on my body also condemn my tongue to silence and my reputation to reproach? Your executioner may abridge the period of my existence; but while I exist I shall not forbear to vindicate my character and motives from your aspersions; and as a man to whom fame is dearer than life I will make the last use of that life in doing justice to that reputation which is to live after me, and which is the only legacy I can leave to those I honor and love, and for whom I am proud to perish. As men, my lord, we must appear at the great day at one common tribunal, and it will then remain for the Searcher of all hearts to show a collective universe who was engaged in the most virtuous actions or actuated by the purest motives my country's oppressors or [Here he was interrupted and told to listen to the sentence of the law.]

My lord, will a dying man be denied the legal privilege of exculpating himself, in the eyes of the community, of an undeserved reproach thrown upon him during his trial, by charging him with ambition and attempting to cast away, for a paltry consideration, the liberties of his country? Why did your lordship insult me, or, rather, why insult justice, in demanding of me why sentence of death should not be pronounced ? I know, my lord, that form prescribes that you should ask the question; the form also presumes a right of answering. This, no doubt, may be dispensed with and so might the whole ceremony of trial, since sentence was already pronounced at the Castle before your jury was impaneled; your lordships are but the priests of the oracle, and I submit; but I insist on the whole of the forms.

[Here the court desired him to proceed.]

I am charged with being an emissary of France! An emissary of Prance! And for what end? It is alleged that I wished to sell the independence of my country! And for what end? Was this the object of my ambition? And is this the mode by which a tribunal of justice reconciles contradictions? No, I am no emissary; and my ambition was to hold a place among the deliverers of my country not in power nor in profit, but in the glory of the achievement! Sell my country's independence to France! And for what ? Was it for a change of masters? No! But for ambition! O my country, was it personal ambition that could influence me, had it been the soul of my actions, could I not by my education and fortune, by the rank and consideration of my family, have placed myself among the proudest of my oppressors ? My country was my idol; to it I sacrificed every selfish, every endearing sentiment; and for it I now offer up my life. O God! No, my lord; I acted as an Irishman, determined on delivering my country from the yoke of a foreign and unrelenting tyranny, and from the more galling yoke of a domestic faction, which is its joint partner and perpetrator in the parricide, whose reward is the ignominy of existing with an exterior of splendor and of conscious depravity. It was the wish of my heart to extricate my country from this doubly-riveted despotism.

I wished to place her independence beyond the reach of any power on earth; I wished to exalt her to that proud station in the world.

Connection with France was indeed intended, but only as far as mutual interest would sanction or require. Were they to assume any authority inconsistent with the purest independence, it would be the signal for their destruction. We sought aid, and we sought it as we had assurances we should obtain it as auxiliaries in war and allies in peace.

Were the French to come as invaders or enemies, uninvited by the wishes of the people, I should oppose them to the utmost of my strength. Yes, my countrymen, I should advise you to meet them on the beach with a sword in one hand and a torch in the other; I would meet them with all the destructive fury of war; and I would animate my countrymen to immolate them in their boats before they had contaminated the soil of my country. If they succeeded in landing, and if forced to retire before superior discipline, I would dispute every inch of ground, burn every blade of grass, and the last intrenchment of liberty should be my grave. What I could not do myself, if I should fall, I should leave as a last charge to my countrymen to accomplish; because I should feel conscious that life, any more than death, is unprofitable when a foreign nation holds my country in subjection.

But it was not as an enemy that the succors of France were to land; I looked indeed for the assistance of France; but I wished to prove to France and to the world that Irishmen deserved to be assisted! that they were indignant at slavery and ready to assert the independence and liberty of their country.

I wished to procure for my country the guarantee which "Washington procured for America; to procure an aid which by its example would be as important as its valor, disciplined, gallant, pregnant with science and experience; which would perceive the good and polish the rough points of our character. They would come to us as strangers and leave us as friends, after sharing in our perils and elevating our destiny. These were my objects not to receive new taskmasters, but to expel old tyrants; these were my views, and these only become Irishmen. It was for these ends I sought aid from France; because France, even as an enemy, could not be more implacable than the enemy already in the bosom of my country.

[Here he was interrupted by the court]

I have been charged with that importance in the efforts to emancipate my country as to be considered the keystone of the combination of Irishmen; or, as your lordship expressed it, '' the life and blood of conspiracy.'' You do me honor overmuch. You have given to the subaltern all the credit of a superior. There are men engaged in this conspiracy who are not only superior to me, but even to your own conceptions of yourself, my lord; men before the splendor of whose genius and virtues I should bow with respectful deference, and who would think themselves dishonored to be called your friend who would not disgrace themselves by shaking your blood-stained hand

[Here he was interrupted.]

What, my lord, shall you tell me, on the passage to that scaffold which that tyranny, of which you are only the intermediary executioner, has erected for my murder, that I am accountable for all the blood that has and will be shed in this struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor ? shall you tell me this and must I be so very a slave as not to repel it?

I do not fear to approach the Omnipotent Judge to answer for the conduct of my whole life; and am I to be appalled and falsified by a mere remnant of mortality here ? by you, too, who, if it were possible to collect all the innocent blood that you have shed in your unhallowed ministry, in one great reservoir, your lordship might swim in it.

[Here the judge interfered.]

Let no man dare, when I am dead, to charge me with dishonor; let no man attaint my memory by believing that

I could have engaged in any cause but that of my country's liberty and independence; or that I could have become the pliant minion of power in the oppression or the miseries .of my countrymen. The proclamation of the provisional government speaks for our views; no inference can be tortured from it to countenance barbarity or debasement at home, or subjection, humiliation, or treachery from abroad. I would not have submitted to a foreign oppressor for the same reason that I would resist the foreign and domestic oppressor; in the dignity of freedom I would have fought upon the threshold of my country, and its enemy should enter only by passing over my lifeless corpse. Am I, who lived but for my country, and who have subjected myself to the dangers of the jealous and watchful oppressor and the bondage of the grave only to give my countrymen their rights and my country her independence, am I to be loaded with calumny and not suffered to resent or repel it? No, God forbid!

If the spirits of the illustrious dead participate in the concerns and cares of those who are dear to them in this transitory life O ever dear and venerated shade of my departed father, look down with scrutiny upon the conduct of your suffering son, and see if I have even for a moment deviated from those principles of morality and patriotism which it was your care to instill into my youthful mind, and for which I am now to offer up my life!

My lords, you are impatient for the sacrifice: the blood which you seek is not congealed by the artificial terrors which surround your victim; it circulates warmly and unruffled through the channels which God created for noble purposes, but which you are bent to destroy for purposes so grievous that they cry to heaven.

Be yet patient! I have but a few words more to say. I am going to my cold and silent grave: my lamp of life is nearly extinguished: my race is run: the grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom! I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world it is the charity of its silence! Let no man write my epitaph: for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain un-inscribed, until other times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.

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