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CHAPTER XIII.

PASSING GLEAMS

The insurgents were full of hope. The manner in which they had repulsed the first attack caused them to await the second almost with disdain. They waited for it with a smile. They had no more doubt as to their success than as to their cause. Moreover, succor was evidently on the way to them. They reckoned on it.

Charles had been out reconnitering and had returned; he stood with folded arms listening to all this joy and enthusiasm. He shook his head and said:

"In one hour you will be attacked. A third of the army of Paris is bearing down upon the barricade in which you now are; there is the National Guard in addition. So far everything has miscarried: only four barricades sustained the first attack, this one and three others. As for the populace it was seething, now it is not stirring. There is nothing to expect, nothing to hope for, neither from a faubourgh nor from a regiment. You are abandoned."

These words effected an undescribable silence. Then a white haired man arose and exclaimed, "So be it; let us remain in the barricade and let us offer the protest of dead corpses; let us show that if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not abandon the people."

The speaker was one of those illustrious Frenchmen who

had spent the best years of his life fighting side by side with the Americans in their struggle for Independence.

These words proceeded from the honesty of a great heart condensed in justice and truth. The effect freed the thought of all from the painful cloud of individual anxieties; it was hailed with an enthusiastic acclamation.

The situation of Jehan in that fatal hour and pitiless place, had as a result a culminating point in the supreme sadness of his lost love. All at once he mounted a stone post; he threw back his head, his abundant dark locks fell back like the mane of a startled lion in the flaming of a halo; a sort of stifled fire darted from his eyes which were filled with an inward look.

Jehan cried, "Citizens, we are on the field of battle; the street is the field; we are engaged in civil war. It is a combat of darkness between Frenchmen. The question is no longer that of sacred territory, but of a holy idea; it is that of sacred duty. You say, 'Down with the tyrant.' Of whom are you speaking? do you call 'Louis Philippe' a tyrant? No more than Louis XVI. Both of them are what history is in the habit of calling good kings. But both represent in a certain measure the confiscation of right; so-called the divine right of kings. Kings create a false and dangerous situation. This leads to two extremes, monstrous opulence and monstrous wretchedness. A situation which sates public power on private misery, which sets the roots of the State in the sufferings of the individual, a badly constituted grandeur in which are combined all the national elements and in which the moral sense does not enter.

"Monarchy is a foreigner; it is despotism violating the moral frontier. An enormous fortress of prejudices, privil

eges, suppressions, lies, exactions, abuses, violences, iniquities and darkness stands erect in this world with its towers of hatred. It must be cast down; this monstrous mass must be made to crumble. Is there just and unjust war?

"War is iniquitous when engaged in assassinating the right, reason, truth; what cause is more just, consequently what war greater than that which re-establishes social truth, restores her throne to liberty, restores the people to the people, restores sovereignty to man and places the human race once more on the level with right. Citizens, onward and courage, we are about to die; that is to say, triumph here.

"Whatever happens today through our defeat as well as through our victory, it is a revolution that we are about to create, which will illumine the whole human race. The revolution which we shall cause is the revolution of the true. From a political point of view, there is but a single principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. The sovereignty of myself is liberty. Where two or three of these sovereignties are combined the State begins, but in that association there is no abdication. Each sovereignty concedes a certain quantity of itself for the purpose of forming the common right; this quantity is the same for all of us. This identity of concession which each makes to all is called equality. Common right is nothing else than the protection of all beaming on the right of each. This protection of all over each is called fraternity. The liberty of each ends only where another's begins. Such is the beginning of an ideal civil government, and when it shall multiply to countless millions, the principle remains the same.

The government remains absolutely impersonal; all the

power there is of it, is derived from the consent of the governed; in it there is no paternalism; each individual is regarded as possessing certain rights; and that being men indeed, are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves what is best for their happiness and the way in which to pursue it, and not to be dealt with as with children.

"Among the rights bestowed upon man as an endowment of his existence direct from the Lord and Creator of us all, are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Being thus bestowed they are inalienable; in that fact abdication is impossible.

"Citizens, let us come to an understanding about equality; for if liberty is the summit, equality is the base. Equality, citizens, is not a surface vegetation, a society of great blades of grass and tiny oaks; a proximity of jealousies which render each other null and void; legally speaking, it is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity; politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight, equally it is all consciences possessed of the same right.

"The solution of everything by universal suffrage is absolutely a modern fact; but it is not new; it is a God-given principle which has been understood by thinkers in all ages.

"Citizens, do you picture to yourselves the future; the streets of cities inundated with light, green branches shading the door-ways, old men blessing little children, thinkers entirely at liberty, believers on terms of full equality, for religion, heaven; God the direct prest, human conscience become the altar, no more hatreds, the fraternity of the workshop and the school, peace over all; no more blood-shed, no more wars, happy mothers. Then there will be nothing more like

the history of old, we shall no longer as today, have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, an interruption of civilization depending on the marriage of kings, on a birth in hereditary tyrannies. A combat of two religions meeting face to face in the dark like two stags on the bridge of eternity. We shall no longer have to fear famine, prostitution arising from distress, misery from the failure of work, and the scaffold and the sword. Now the law of progress is that monsters shall disappear before the angels, and that fatality shall vanish before fraternity.

"Friends, the hour in which I am addressing you is a gloomy hour. It is a bad time to pronounce the word love; no matter, I do pronounce it, and I glorify it. Love, the future is thine. Citizens, in the future there will be neither darkness nor thunderbolts, neither ferocious ignorance nor bloody retaliation. As there will be no more Satan there will be no more war. Oh, the human race will accomplish its law, be delivered, raised up, and consoled: we affirm it on this barricade. Whence shall proceed that cry, love, if not from the heights of sacrifice? Oh, my brothers, this is the point of junction of those who think and of those who suffer; this barricade is not made of stones, or of timber and bits of iron; it is made of a heap of ideas and a heap of woes. Here misery meets ideal. From the embrace of all desolations faith leaps forth. In the future no one will kill anyone else, the earth will beam with radiance, the human race will love. The day will come, citizens, when all will be concord, harmony, light, joy and life; it will come, and it is in order that it may come that we are about to die. Brothers, he who dies

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