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the greater is the evil. A talented king is worse than a fool. His ambition carries him to conquest, and to despotism; his people are soon reduced to bewail his glory, singing Te Deums while they die of hunger.

But if Royalty is fatal inasmuch as it is Royalty, so, as hereditary succession, is it equally revolting and ridiculous.

What, Citizens! is there among our fellows a man who imagines himself born to govern us? Whence does he hold this right ?-From his ancestors, and from ours,' says he. But, how could they transmit to him a right which they had not? Man has no authority over the generations to come. I can no more be the slave of the dead, than that of the living. An hereditary crown! a transmittable throne! least reflection, is there a man who can tolerate it? be the property of certain individuals, born or to be born! beforehand with our descendants, as with brutes who would have neither will nor right! To inherit a government is to inherit the people, as if they were flocks and herds.

What a notion! After the
Human beings, then, would
We should deal

We are wrong in reproaching kings for their ferocity, their brutal apathy, the oppression of the people, and the vexations of the citizens: it is the hereditary principle which makes them what they are. The hereditary principle produces monsters, as a morass engenders vipers.

This is, in effect, the course of reasoning pursued by every hereditary prince. 'I possess my power in right of my birth; my birth is the gift of God: therefore I owe nothing unto men:' So, has he a minister at all complaisant, he forthwith conscienciously indulges himself in all the crimes of Tyranny. this in all ages and in all countries.

We have beheld

A monarch is an egotist by nature; he is pre-eminently an egotist. Ten thousand traits show that this sort of men is nowhere connected with the rest of Humanity. The people demanded from one of the kings of the country in which I was born, (Charles II.,) the punishment of Lauderdale, his favourite, who had shamefully oppressed the Scotch. Ay!' said he, coolly, 'the fellow has done a great deal against the State: but I do not see that he has done anything against me.' Your Louis XIII. would often say:-'If I were to conduct myself according to the wishes of the people, I should do nothing for the king?'

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If Nature could make a law which should invariably fix wisdom and virtue in those privileged castes which perpetuate themselves upon thrones, objections to their inheritance would cease. But, if we take a review of Europe, it is the contrary that everywhere presents itself. All the monarchs there are the very dregs of Humanity. This one is a tyrant; that other an idiot; another a traitor; this last a debauchee; some are collections of all vices. It is as if Fate and Nature had taken pleasure in exhibiting, at this period, to all nations, the ridiculousness and enormity of Royalty. In whatever manner we consider it, we find the notion of Hereditary Royalty only foolishness and infamy. What is this office which infants and idiots are capable of filling? Some talent is required to be a common workman; to be a king no more is needed, than to have a human figure, to be a living automaton. We are astonished at reading that the Egyptians set upon the throne a stone, which they call a king. Well! such a monarch

was less absurd and less mischievous than those before whom nations prostrate themselves. At least, he deceived no one. None supposed that he possessed qualities, or a character. They did not call him the Father of his People: and yet it would have been scarcely more ridiculous, than to give such a title to a blockhead whom the right of succession crowns at the age of eighteen. A dumb idol is better than one animated,

Thus, Citizens! Royalty is as repugnant to common sense, as to the common right. It would be a scourge, even while an absurdity. For a people who can bow down to worship a folly is a degraded people. How can they be fit for great actions-the men who pay the same homage to vice as to virtue, who render the same submission to ignorance as to wisdom? Of all superstitions none has more debased men's minds. We seek the cause of abjectness of character in the monarchical system: there it is.

When you pronounced the abolition of Royalty, no one rose in its defence: it was expected. Only among the royalists were any found to prop up the monarchy or to plead in its behalf. Permit me to examine their most specious arguments.

‘A king is necessary to preserve a nation from the tyranny of the great. Establish the rights of man; let equality reign; make a good constitution; a good division of powers; let there be no privileges, no distinctions of birth, no monopolies; let there be freedom for Industry and for Trade; an equal division of successions; publicity for the acts of the government; liberty of the Press: with all these points guaranteed to you by good laws, you will have no great men to fear. Willing or unwilling, all the citizens will be under the Law.

'The Legislative Body might usurp the sovereignty; and a king is necessary to keep them in check.' With Representatives who are frequently renewed, who are neither ministers nor judges, whose functions are determined by law; with National Conventions-those primary assemblies which can be convoked at any moment; with a People who know how to read, and how to fight; with good muskets, good pikes, and good journals;-a Legislative Body would have some trouble in enjoying a few months of tyranny.

This might have been

'A King is necessary, to give force to the Executive."' said when there existed Nobles, a Clergy, Parliaments, and Privileged Persons of all kinds, But who, now, can resist the Law, which is the will of all, and in the execution of which all are interested? On the contrary, the existence of an hereditary prince excites perpetual distrust among the friends of Liberty; his authority is hateful to them; to oppose despotism, they are, every moment, clogging the action of government. This is why the Executive has become so feeble, since we pretended to marry Royalty with Liberty.

Others advance this wretched argument:-'If there be no hereditary chief, there will be an elective chief; the citizens will be divided-for the one, and for the other; and there will be a civil war at every election.'-But is it not certain, that it was the hereditary principle alone which produced the civil wars of France and England; and that it was the pretended rights of royal families which twenty times brought upon these countries the scourge of civil wars?

What we should especially remark is that, if there be an elective chief, that

chief will not be a king surrounded by courtiers, overladen with pomps, covered with idolatrous homage, and portioned with a civil-list of thirty millions; and that no one will be tempted to take up arms, to place, during a few years, a citizen-his equal-in a post where he will have but a limited income, and very circumscribed power.

In a word, Citizens! whoever desires the equality and comfort of the People, will have no king. Whoever asks for a king, asks for a nobility and thirty millions of taxes. This is why my compatriot, Franklin, looked upon Royalism as a crime equal to the crime of poisoning.

Royalty, its fanatical eclat, its superstitious idolatry, the false prejudice of its necessity, all these lies have been invented only to obtain from men excessive contributions and a willing servitude. Royalty and Papacy have the same end;they are supported by the same artifices; and they fall before the same light.

Your fellow-citizen and colleague,

THOMAS PAINE.

THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRE.

(Abridged from Carlyle.)

'It is unfortunate, though very natural, that the history of this Period has generally been written in hysterics.'-Thomas Carlyle.

Two great movements: a rushing against domestic Traitors, a rushing against foreign Despots. The Country is in danger: in danger, truly, if ever Country was. Arise, O Country! or be trodden down to ignominious ruin. Nay, are not the chances a hundred to one that no rising of the Country will save it Brunswick, the Emigrants, and Feudal Europe drawing nigh? More desperate posture no country ever stood in.

Longwi, our first strong place on the borders, is fallen in fifteen hours.' Brunswick is at Verdun: Verdun surrendered. Eighty thousand of the invading army, sworn to rescue or revenge the Usurper, advance from stage to stage who shall stay them? covering forty miles of country. Foragers fly far; the villages of the North-East are harried. Brunswick's Manifesto offers no very pleasant terms' to the patriotism of Paris.

It is the 2nd of September when rumour of the fall of Verdun is in Paris. On the moment huge placards are plastered to the walls; at two o'clock the stormbell shall be sounded, the alarm-cannon fired; all Paris shall rush to the Champde-Mars and have itself enrolled. Unarmed truly, and undrilled; but desperate, in the strength of frenzy. The very women offer to mount guard. Terror is in these streets of Paris; terror and rage, fierce desperation rushing to battle; mothers, with streaming eyes and wild hearts, sending forth their sons to die. Terror itself has become courage; for Danton has spoken for all :-It would not do to quit Paris and fly to Saumer; they must abide by Paris and take such attitude as would put their enemies'in fear.' 'It is not the alarm cannon that we

hear: it is the pas-de-charge against our enemies. To conquer them, to hurl them back, what do we require? To dare, and again to dare, and evermore to dare.' But La-Vendée is rising at our backs,-eight thousand peasants at Châtillon, for a beginning: the loyal (which should have been patriotic) warmth of a simple People blown into flame and fury by theological and seignorial bellows. Treason is manifest enough. Are not thirty-thousand Aristocrats within our own walls, of whom but some hundreds are yet in prison, to be tried, perhaps to escape? If not thirty-thousand, yet more than it were wise to have in our rear, whether we advance, or only man the walls. Shall we be content to take the horses out of noble carriages, cutting the traces, seizing them by the bridle, that they may draw cannon; and shall we leave the nobles to sit there plotting? Think somewhat of this among your defences.

It is the 2nd of September. Through this Paris, frenzied with its agony, of frantic enrolments, of mothers' tears, and soldiers' farewell shoutings, while the tocsin is pealing its loudest, some thirty priests, who had refused to swear to the Constitution, men openly disaffected, fare in six carriages along the streets, from preliminary detention at the Town Hall toward the Prison of the Abbaye. They pass through the excited multitude: what else but curses could greet them on their way? Accursed Aristocrat Hypocrites, this is the pass ye have brought us to. Men mount even on the carriage steps; ever the reproaches grow more vehement. Pull up the carriage blinds! Not so; you shall listen to us. One of the prisoners strikes the hand that is on his blind; that not sufficing, smites, with his cane, the uncovered head sharply, and again more sharply, as he would smite a dog. It is perhaps only a poor man. Next moment the carriages are locked and blocked in raging tumults. The thirty priests, all save one, are

massacred at the prison gate.

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This sudden thunder-burst once over, a strange Court of Justice, or call it Court of Revenge and Wild-Justice fashions itself in the Abbaye Prison, and takes scat round a table, with the Prison Registers spread before it.

The like

is done at La Force, at the Châtelet, in all the seven prisons of Paris: unwonted wild tumult howling all around. Swift: a name is called; bolts jingle, a Prisoner is there. A few questions are put; swiftly this sudden Jury decides: Royalist Plotter or not? Clearly not; in that case, Let the Prisoner be enlarged with Vive la Nation. Or be it yea; then still, Let the Prisoner be en

larged, but without Vive la Nation; or else it may run, Let the Prisoner be conducted to La Force. At La Force again their formula is, Let the Prisoner be conducted to the Abbaye.-'To La Force, then!' The doomed man is seized, conducted, not into La Force, but under an arch of wild sabres, axes and pikes. So at the prison gates corpse falls on corpse, and blood runs down the kennel; men horribly disfigured with many wounds, ghastly as if they had fallen under the sabres or the cannon of a Castlereagh or a Cavaignac. Man and woman:

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"Revenge," my friends! revenge is for evermore intrinsically a correct and even a divine feeling. I perceive this same sacred glow of divine wrath to be the foundation for all Criminal Law and Official horse-hair-and-bombazeen procedure against scoundrels in this world.'--Thomas Carlyle on Model Prisons.

Yet 'amiable men,' respectable withal, talked coolly of grape-shotting the rabble, throwing a shell or two among them, on the Tenth of April, 1848, when the Country was not in danger.

like the orderly established Gallows, the People's wrath spared neither the brave, nor the beautiful, nor the weak, provided they are proved to be traitors. Yet the wild rage is measured. During the hundred hours of execution, from Sunday till Thursday evening, the circuit of King Louis' prison is guarded by a tricolour ribbon. There are pardons and acquittals too. Old Marquis Cazotte is doomed to die; but his young daughter clasps him in her arms; the heart of the killers themselves is touched; the old man is spared. In ten days more a Court of Law condemned him, and he had to die elsewhere. Old M. Sombreuil also had a daughter :-My Father is not an Aristocrat: O good gentlemen, I will swear it, and testify it, and in all ways prove it; we are not, we hate Aristocrats. 'Wilt thou drink Aristocrats' blood?' The man lifts blood (if Rumour can be credited); the poor maiden does drink. "This Sombreuil is innocent then!' Yes indeedThe pikes rattle to the ground, there are bursts of jubilee over a brother saved; and the old man and his daughter are clasped to bloody bosoms, with hot tears, and borne home in triumph of Vive la Nation, the killers refusing even money. Does it seem strange this temper of theirs?

It seems very certain, well-proved by Royalist testimony in other instances, and very significant. So far our historian.

And here are extracts from the notes of one who was undeservedly acquitted; which may show the character of the tribunal. In his own words.

.

'Behold me haled before this swift and bloody judgment bar, where all resources of ingenuity became null if they were not founded upon truth: "My name is Jourgniac Saint-Méard, an officer. I am accused of editing the Journal De la Cour "You tell us you are not this

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et de la Ville. But I hope to prove the falsity." ,, с and not that what are you then ?"-"I was an open Royalist." There was a general murmur, which was appeased by another of the men. "We are not here to judge opinions," said he, "but to judge the results of them.” "Yes, Messieurs," cried I, "always till the Tenth of August I was an open Royalist. Ever since the Tenth of August that cause has been finished. I am a Frenchman, true to my country, I was always a man of honour," etc... The President, this cross-questioning being over, took off his hat, and said "I see nothing to suspect in this man; I am for granting him his liberty. Is that your vote? To which all the judges answered: Yes, yes; it is just."'

Thus Jourgniac escaped from the September Massacre, otherwise called Severe Justice of the People. 'Divine Wrath against Scoundrels.' Others also 'escaped.' During the four days one thousand and eighty nineneither more nor less-of whom two hundred and two were Priests, were executed. Horrible indeed! whether we call it massacre, justice or revenge. And yet three years later General Bonaparte in, not one hundred hours, but one hour, blows two hundred men into fragments; and it is not called horrible, because— Perhaps some peace man will tell us. Or some friend of 'order' may compare this September 'massacre' or 'wild-justice,' with the following from an official paper, of Pesth no further back than September 1st, 1850.

--

'The 9th, ult: at dawn, the regular pillage began. The signal was given with trumpets; the plunder was granted to every regiment by turns. After a regiment had plundered it

Jourgniac's defence, says Carlyle, is long-winded and uninteresting-with a loose theatricality in the reporting which tends toward unveracity.

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