"Louder, Sir, Louder» — Mr. President, on the last day, when the angel Gabriel shall have descended from the heavens, and, placing one foot upon the sea and the other upon the land, shall lift to his lips the golden trumpet, and proclaim to the living and the resurrected dead that time shall be no more, I have no doubt, sir, that some infernal fool from Buffalo will start up and cry out, "Louder, please, sir, louder ! »—(From a speech at Buffalo, denouncing a malicious interruption.) Mason, George (American, 1725-1792.)

Against a Military Caste-No man has a greater regard for the military gentlemen than I have. I admire their intrepidity, perseverance, and valor. But when once a standing army is established in any country the people lose their liberty. When, against a regular disciplined army, yeomanry are the only defense, yeomanry, unskillful and unarmed,-what chance is there for preserving freedom? Give me leave to recur to the page of history, to warn you of your present danger. Recollect the history of most nations of the world. What havoc, desolation, and destruction have been perpetrated by standing armies! (Virginia Convention, 1788.)

Massillon, Jean Baptiste (France, 1663-1742.) The Power of an Evil Tongue - The tongue, says the Apostle James, is a devouring fire, a world of iniquity, an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. And behold what I would have applied to the tongue of the evil-speaker, had I undertaken to give you a just and natural idea of all the enormity of this vice; I would have said that the tongue of the slanderer is a devouring fire which tarnishes whatever it touches; which exercises its fury on the good grain, equally as on the chaff; on the profane, as on the sacred; which, wherever it passes, leaves only desolation and ruin; digs even into the bowels of the earth, and fixes itself on things the most hidden; turns into vile ashes what only a moment before had appeared to us so precious and brilliant; acts with more violence and danger than ever, in the time when it was apparently smothered up and almost extinct; which blackens what it cannot consume, and sometimes sparkles and delights before it destroys. I would have told you that evil-speaking is an assemblage of iniquity; a secret pride, which discovers to us the mote in our brother's eye, but hides the beam which is in our own;

a mean envy, which, hurt at the talents or prosperity of others, makes them the subject of its censures, and studies to dim the splendor of whatever outshines itself; a disguised hatred, which sheds, in its speeches, the hidden venom of the heart; an unworthy duplicity, which praises to the face and tears to pieces behind the back; a shameful levity, which has no command over itself or its words, and often sacrifices both fortune and comfort to the imprudence of an amusing conversation; a deliberate barbarity, which goes to pierce your absent brother; a scandal, where you become a subject of shame and sin to those who listen to you; an injustice, where you ravish from your brother what is dearest to him. I should have said that slander is a restless evil, which disturbs society, spreads dissension through cities and countries, disunites the strictest friendships; is the source of hatred and revenge; fills, wherever it enters, with disturbances and confusion, and everywhere is an enemy to peace, comfort, and Christian goodbreeding. Lastly, I should have added that it is an evil full of deadly poison; whatever flows from it is infected, and poisons whatever it approaches; that even its praises are empoisoned, its applauses malicious, its silence criminal, its gestures, motions, and looks, have all their venom, and spread it each in their

way.

"If we Must Wholly Perish » — If we must wholly perish, what to us are the sweet ties of kindred? what the tender names of parent, child, sister, brother, husband, wife, or friend? The characters of a drama are not more elusive. We have no ancestors, no descendants; since succession cannot be predicated of nothingness. Would we honor the illustrious dead? How absurd to honor that which has no existence! Would we take thought for posterity? How frivolous to concern ourselves for those whose end, like our own, must soon be annihilation! Have we made a promise? How can it bind nothing to nothing? Perjury is but a jest. The last injunctions of the dying,-what sanctity have they, more than the last sound of a chord that is snapped, of an instrument that is broken?

If we must wholly perish, then is obedience to the laws but an insensate servitude; rulers and magistrates are but the phantoms which popular imbecility has raised up; justice is an unwar. rantable infringement upon the liberty of men, - an imposition, an usurpation; the law of mar riage is a vain scruple; modesty, a prejudice; honor and probity, such stuff as dreams are made of; and incests, murders, parricides, the most heartless cruelties, and the blackest crimes, are but the legitimate sports of man's irresponsible nature; while the harsh epithets attached to them are merely such as the policy of legislators has invented, and imposed on the credulity of the people.

Mather, Cotton (American, 1663-1728.)

The Only True Prosperity-Will health and wealth and rest among a people make a

blessed people? 'Tis commonly thought so. But what will God have among a people? Oh, blessed that people whose god is the Lord, and who have a gracious preference of God among them. Even such are the people who know the joyful sound! Where the Gospel, with the ordinances of it are well settled, maintained, respected, and the silver trumpets well sounded among a people, it may be said, as in Numbers, xxiii. 21: "The Lord their God is with them, and the shout of a king is among them.”

Mazzini, Giuseppe (Italy, 1805-1872.)

*To the Young Men of Italy-When I was commissioned by you, young men, to proffer in this temple a few words sacred to the memory of the brothers Bandiera and their fellow-martyrs at Cosenza, I thought that some of those who heard me might exclaim with noble indignation: "Wherefore lament over the dead? The martyrs of liberty are only worthily honored by winning the battle they have begun; Cosenza, the land where they fell, is enslaved; Venice, the city of their birth, is begirt by foreign foes. Let us emancipate them, and until that moment let no words pass our lips save words of war."

But another thought arose : "Why have we not conquered? Why is it that, while we are fighting for independence in the north of Italy, liberty is perishing in the south? Why is it that a war, which should have sprung to the Alps with the bound of a lion, has dragged itself along for four months, with the slow uncertain motion of the scorpion surrounded by a circle of fire? How has the rapid and powerful intuition of a people newly arisen to life been converted into the weary, helpless effort of the sick man turning from side to side? Ah! had we all arisen in the sanctity of the idea for which our martyrs died; had the holy standard of their faith preceded our youth to battle; had we reached that unity of life which was in them so powerful, and made of our every action a thought, and of our every thought an action; had we devoutly gathered up their last words in our hearts, and learned from them that liberty and independence are one; that God and the people, the fatherland and humanity, are the two inseparable terms of the device of every people striving to become a nation; that Italy can have no true life till she be one, holy in the equality and love of all her children, great in the worship of eternal truth, and consecrated to a lofty mission, a moral priesthood among the peoples of Europe, we should now have had, not war, but victory; Cosenza would not be compelled to venerate the memory of her martyrs in secret, nor Venice be restrained from honoring them with a monument; and we, gathered here together, might gladly invoke their sacred names, without uncertainty as to our future destiny, or

* This is without doubt the best example of lofty and sustained eloquence in modern oratory. It is given in full as an adequate illustration of what the highest art can do to accredit the most intense earnestness.

a cloud of sadness on our brows, and say to those precursor souls: "Rejoice! for your spirit is incarnate in your brethren, and they are worthy of you."

The idea which they worshiped, young men, does not as yet shine forth in its full purity and integrity upon your banner. The sublime program which they, dying, bequeathed to the rising Italian generation, is yours, but mutilated, broken up into fragments by the false doctrines, which, elsewhere overthrown, have taken refuge amongst us. I look around, and I see the struggles of desperate populations, an alternation of generous rage and of unworthy repose; of shouts for freedom and of formulas of servitude, throughout all parts of our Peninsula; but the soul of the country, where is it? What unity is there in this unequal and manifold movement,-where is the word that should dominate the hundred diverse and opposing counsels which mislead or seduce the multitude? I hear phrases usurping the national omnipotence,-" The Italy of the North,-the league of the States, -Federative compacts between Princes," but Italy, where is it? Where is the common country, the country which the Bandiera hailed as thrice Initiatrix of a new era of European civilization?

Intoxicated with our first victories, improvident for the future, we forgot the idea revealed by God to those who suffered; and God has punished our forgetfulness by deferring our triumph. The Italian movement, my countrymen, is, by decree of Providence, that of Europe. We arise to give a pledge of moral progress to the European world. But neither political fictions, nor dynastic aggrandizements, nor theories of expediency, can transform or renovate the life of the peoples. Humanity lives and moves through faith; great principles are the guiding stars that lead Europe towards the future. Let us turn to the graves of our martyrs, and ask inspiration of those who died for us all, and we shall find the secret of victory in the adoration of a faith. The angel of martyrdom and the angel of victory are brothers; but the one looks up to heaven, and the other looks down to earth; and it is when, from epoch to epoch, their glance meets between earth and heaven, that creation is embellished with a new life, and a people arises from the cradle or the tomb, evangelist or prophet.

I will sum up for you in a few words this faith of our martyrs; their external life is known to you all; it is now a matter of history, and I need not recall it to you.

The faith of the brothers Bandiera, which was and is our own, was based upon a few simple uncontrovertible truths, which few, indeed, venture to declare false, but which are, nevertheless, forgotten or betrayed by

most:

God and the People.

God at the summit of the social edifice; the people, the universality of our brethren, at the

Mazzini, Giusseppe - Continued

base. God, the Father and Educator; the people, the progressive interpreter of his law.

No true society can exist without a common belief and a common aim. Religion declares the belief and the aim. Politics regulate society in the practical realization of that belief, and prepare the means of attaining that aim. Religion represents the principle, politics the application. There is but one sun in heaven for all the earth. There is one law for all those who people the earth. It is alike the law of the human being and of collective humanity. We are placed here below not for the capricious exercise of our own individual faculties, our faculties and liberty are the means, not the end, - not to work out our own happiness upon earth; happiness can only be reached elsewhere, and there God works for us; but to consecrate our existence to the discovery of a portion of the Divine law; to practice it as far as our individual circumstances and powers allow, and to diffuse the knowledge and love of it among our brethren.

We are here below to labor fraternally to build up the unity of the human family, so that the day may come when it shall represent a single sheepfold with a single shepherd, - the spirit of God, the Law.

To aid our search after truth, God has given to us tradition and the voice of our own conscience. Wherever they are opposed, is error. To attain harmony and consistence between the conscience of the individual and the conscience of humanity, no sacrifice is too great. The family, the city, the fatherland, and humanity are but different spheres in which to exercise our activity and our power of sacrifice towards this great aim. God watches from above the inevitable progress of humanity, and from time to time he raises up the great in genius, in love, in thought, or in action, as priests of his truth, and guides to the multitude on their way.

These principles, indicated in their letters, in their proclamations, and in their conversation, with a profound sense of the mission intrusted by God to the individual and to humanity, were to Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, and their fellow-martyrs, the guide and comfort of a weary life; and, when men and circumstances had alike betrayed them, these principles sustained them in death, in religious serenity and calm certainty of the realization of their immortal hopes for the future of Italy. The immense energy of their souls arose from the intense love which informed their faith. And could they now arise from the grave and speak to you, they would, believe me, address you, though with a power very different from that which is given to me, in counsel not unlike this which I now offer to you.

Love! love is the flight of the soul towards God; towards the great, the sublime, and the beautiful, which are the shadow of God upon earth. Love your family, the partner of your life, those around you ready to share your joys

and sorrows; love the dead who were dear to you and to whom you were dear. But let your love be the love taught you by Dante and by us, the love of souls that aspire together; do not grovel on the earth in search of a felicity which it is not the destiny of the creature to reach here below; do not yield to a delusion which inevitably would degrade you into egotism. To love is to give and take a promise for the future. God has given us love, that the weary soul may give and receive support upon the way of life. It is a flower springing up on the path of duty; but it cannot change its course. Purify, strengthen, and improve yourselves by loving. Act always, even at the price of increasing her earthly trials,- so that the sister soul united to your own may never need, here or elsewhere, to blush through you or for you. The time will come when, from the height of a new life, embracing the whole past and comprehending its secret, you will smile together at the sorrows you have endured, the trials you have overcome.

An

Love your country. Your country is the land where your parents sleep, where is spoken that language in which the chosen of your heart, blushing, whispered the first word of love; it is the home that God has given you, that by striving to perfect yourselves therein, you may prepare to ascend to him. It is your name, your glory, your sign among the people. Give to it your thoughts, your counsels, your blood. Raise it up, great and beautiful as it was foretold by our great men, and see that you leave it uncontaminated by any trace of falsehood or of servitude; unprofaned by dismemberment. Let it be one, as the thought of God. You are twentyfive millions of men, endowed with active, splendid faculties; possessing a tradition of glory the envy of the nations of Europe. immense future is before you; you lift your eyes to the loveliest heaven, and around you smiles the loveliest land in Europe; you are encircled by the Alps and the sea, boundaries traced out by the finger of God for a people of giants, you are bound to be such, or nothing. Let not a man of that twenty-five millions remain excluded from the fraternal bond destined to join you together; let not a glance be raised to that heaven which is not the glance of a free man. Let Rome be the ark of your redemption, the temple of your nation. Has she not twice been the temple of the destinies of Europe? In Rome two extinct worlds, the Pagan and the Papal, are superposed like the double jewels of a diadem; draw from these a third world greater than the two. From Rome, the holy city, the city of love (Amor) the purest and wisest among you, elected by the vote and fortified by the inspiration of a whole people, shall dictate the Pact that shall make us one, and represent us in the future alliance of the peoples. Until then you will either have no country, or have her contaminated and profaned.

Love humanity. You can only ascertain your own mission from the aim set by God before humanity at large. God has given you your country as cradle, and humanity as mother; you

Mazzini, Giusseppe - Continued

cannot rightly love your brethren of the cradle if you love not the common mother. Beyond the Alps, beyond the sea, are other peoples now fighting or preparing to fight the holy fight of independence, of nationality, of liberty; other peoples striving by different routes to reach the same goal,-improvement, association, and the foundation of an authority which shall put an end to moral anarchy and re-link earth to heaven; an authority which mankind may love and obey without remorse or shame. Unite with them; they will unite with you. Do not invoke their aid where your single arm will suffice to conquer; but say to them that the hour will shortly sound for a terrible struggle between right and blind force, and that in that hour you will ever be found with those who have raised the same banner as yourselves.

And love, young men, love and venerate the ideal. The ideal is the word of God. High above every country, high above humanity, is the country of the spirit, the city of the soul, in which all are brethren who believe in the inviolability of thought and in the dignity of our immortal soul; and the baptism of this fraternity is martyrdom. From that high sphere spring the principles which alone can redeem the peoples. Arise for the sake of these, and not from impatience of suffering or dread of evil. Anger, pride, ambition, and the desire of material prosperity, are arms common alike to the peoples and their oppressors, and even should you conquer with these to-day, you would fall again to-morrow; but principles belong to the peoples alone, and their oppressors can find no arms to oppose them. Adore enthusiasm, the dreams of the virgin soul, and the visions of early youth, for they are a perfume of paradise which the soul retains in issuing from the hands of its Creator. Respect above all things your conscience; have upon your lips the truth implanted by God in your hearts, and, while laboring in harmony, even with those who differ from you, in all that tends to the emancipation of our soil, yet ever bear your own banner erect and boldly promulgate your own faith.

Such words, young men, would the martyrs of Cosenza have spoken, had they been living amongst you; and here, where it may be that, invoked by our love, their holy spirits hover near us, I call upon you to gather them up in your hearts and to make of them a treasure amid the storms that yet threaten you; storms which, with the name of our martyrs on your lips and their faith in your hearts, you will overcome.

God be with you, and bless Italy!- (Complete. Text from the "World's Best Orations." Delivered at Milan in memory of the martyrs of Cosenza, July 25th, 1848.)

Meagher, Thomas Francis (Ireland, 1823-1867.)

« Abhor the Sword Stigmatize the Sword" - Be it in the defense, or be it in the assertion of a people's liberty, I hail the sword as a sacred weapon; and if, my lord, it has sometimes taken the shape of the serpent

and reddened the shroud of the oppressor with too deep a dye, like the anointed rod of the high priest, it has at other times, and as often, blossomed into celestial flowers to deck the freeman's brow.

Abhor the sword - stigmatize the sword! No, my lord, for in the passes of the Tyrol it cut to pieces the banner of the Bavarians, and through those cragged passes struck a path to fame for the peasant insurrectionists of Innsbruck.

Abhor the sword-stigmatize the sword! No, my lord, for at its blow a grand nation started from the waters of the Atlantic; and by its redeeming magic, and in the quivering of its crimson light, the crippled colony sprang into the attitude of a proud republic,-prosperous, limitless, and invincible.

By

The Curse of Dependence - A good government may, indeed, redress the grievances of an injured people, but a strong people alone can build up a great nation. To be strong, a people must be self-reliant, self-ruled, selfsustained. The dependence of one people upon another, even for the benefits of legislation, is the deepest source of national weakness. an unnatural law, it exempts a people from their just duties - their just responsibilities. When you exempt a people from these duties, from these responsibilities, you generate in them a distrust in their own powers. Thus you enervate, if you do not utterly destroy, that spirit which a sense of these responsibilities is sure to inspire, and which the fulfillment of these duties never fails to invigorate. Where this spirit does not actuate, the country may be tranquil, it will not be prosperous. may exist, it will not thrive. It may hold together, it will not advance. Peace it may enjoy,- for peace and freedom are compatible. But, my lord, it will neither accumulate wealth nor win a character; it will neither benefit mankind by the enterprise of its merchants, nor instruct mankind by the example of its statesmen. (1846. )

It

Government by the Gallows- Whether hanging ever did, or can, answer any good purpose, I doubt; but the cruel exhibition of every execution day is a proof that hanging carries no terror with it. The multiplicity of our hanging laws has produced these two things: frequency of condemnation, and frequent pardons. If we look to the executions themselves, what examples do they give? The thief dies either hardened or penitent. All that admiration and contempt of death with which heroes and martyrs inspire good men in a good cause, the abandoned villain feels, in seeing a desperado like himself meet death with intrepidity. The penitent thief, on the other hand, often makes the sober villain think that by robbery, forgery, or murder, he can relieve all his wants; and, if he be brought to justice, the punishment will be short and trifling, and the reward eternal.

Miller, Hugh (Scotland, 1802-1856.)

The Procession of Being-Never yet on Egyptian obelisk or Assyrian frieze,-where long lines of figures seem stalking across the granite, each charged with symbol and mystery, -have our Layards or Rawlinsons seen aught so extraordinary as that long procession of being which, starting out of the blank depths of the bygone eternity, is still defiling across the stage, and of which we ourselves form some of the passing figures.-(From his Edinburgh Address.)

The Sown Seeds of Life-He who keeps faith with all his humbler creatures,-who gives to even the bee and the dormouse the winter for which they prepare,-will to a certainty not break faith with man,- with man, alike the deputed lord of the present creation and the chosen heir of all the future. We have been looking abroad on the old geologic burying-grounds, and deciphering the strange inscriptions on their tombs; but there are other burying-grounds and other tombs,- solitary church-yards among the hills, where the dust of the martyrs lies, and tombs that rise over the ashes of the wise and good; nor are there wanting, on even the monuments of the perished races, frequent hieroglyphics, and symbols of high meaning, which darkly intimate to us that while their burial-yards contain but the débris of the past, we are to regard the others as charged with the sown seeds of the future. - (From his Edinburgh Address.)

Milton, John (England, 1608-1674.)

"An Eagle Mewing Her Mighty Youth »For as in a body, when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and vigorous, not only to vital, but to rational faculties, and those in the acutest, and the pertest operations of wit and subtlety, it argues in what good plight and constitution the body is, so when the cheerfulness of the people is so sprightly up, as that it has, not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom and safety, but to spare and to bestow upon the solidest and sublimest points of controversy and new invention, it betokens us not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatal decay, but casting off the old and wrinkled skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young again, entering the glorious ways of truth and prosperous virtue destined to become great and honorable in these latter ages. Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms.-(From Areopagitica. A speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing.)

Mirabeau, Gabriel Honoré Riquetti, Comte de (France, 1749-1791.)

Educating Conscience a Duty-If it be contrary to morality to act against one's conscience, it is none the less so to form one's conscience after false and arbitrary principles. The obligation to form and enlighten one's conscience is anterior to the obligation to follow one's conscience. The greatest public calamities have been caused by men who believed they were obeying God, and saving their own souls.

Announcing the Death of Franklin — Franklin is dead! Restored to the bosom of the Divinity is that genius which gave treedom to America, and rayed forth torrents of light upon Europe. The sage whom two worlds claim, the man whom the history of empires and the history of science alike contend for,occupied, it cannot be denied, a lofty rank among his species. Long enough have political cabinets signalized the death of those who were great in their funeral eulogies only. Long enough has the etiquette of courts prescribed hypocritical mournings. For their benefactors only should nations assume the emblem of grief; and the representatives of nations should commend only the heroes of humanity to public veneration.

We live under a form of government and in a state of society to which the world has never yet exhibited a parallel. Is it, then, nothing to be free? How many nations in the whole annals of humankind have proved themselves worthy of being so? Is it nothing that we are republicans? Were all men as enlightened, as brave, as proud as they ought to be, would they suffer themselves to be insulted with any other title? Is it nothing that so many independent sovereignties should be held together in such a confederacy as ours? What does history teach us of the difficulty of instituting and maintaining such a polity, and of the glory that, of consequence, ought to be given to those who enjoy its advantages in so much perfection and on so grand a scale? For can anything be more striking and sub lime than the idea of an imperial republic, spreading over an extent of territory more immense than the empire of the Cæsars in the accumulated conquests of a thousand years, without prefects, or proconsuls, or publicans founded in the maxims of common sense-employing within itself no arms but those of reason-and known to its subjects only by the blessings it bestows or perpetuates, yet capable of directing against a foreign foe all the energies of a military despotism, -a republic in which men are completely insignificant, and principles and laws exercise, throughout its vast dominion, a peaceful and irresistible sway, blending in one divine harmony such various habits and conflicting opinions, and mingling in its institutions the light of philosophy with all that is dazzling in the associations of heroic achieve