Читать книгу: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 44, June, 1861», страница 6
"Let me be welcome; I come to teach you."
I knew that among her tribe she had the reputation of a prophetess, but
I had never heard her speak English.
"I am waiting to hear," I said; and this woman fixed her sad, solemn eyes on me and said,—
"Child of the pale man, a great many moons ago, when my eyes were bright like the little quiver-flower, and the young warriors sought me in my father's wigwam, I had a sister. Her name he called Luella. The chiefs of the tribe were going for a grand hunt on the Huron. Some pale men from across the lake came to join them. One of them looked on Luella, and her eyes grew soft and sad. She wrapped her blanket about her, and walked often under the stars at night. Through the winter, she would not talk with the young chiefs; and when the leaves grew again, the pale men came back, and Luella walked again under the stars. She learned English, and no one knew who taught her.
"The hunt went on again until the snow came; and when the pale men left the lodge, Luella was lost from the wigwam. The warriors went in pursuit, but they came back without Luella. She was not with the pale-faces. Many moons came and went, and one night I heard a voice singing in the distance. I knew it was Luella, and she led a child by her side, and he said soft English words. She would not come into the lodge. She only came to tell me that she was with the white man who loved her, that she was content, and to show me her boy; and Luella walked away into the night again, and I told no one.
"I made many moccasons, and wove baskets of twigs; and when Uncas, the chief of the tribe, my father, went to the great hunting-ground beyond the Sun, then I gathered up my moccasons, and went out before the gate opened to let the light through. I left the wigwam for Luella. I hated white people; I hated the white man who stole Luella from me; but the pale-faces took my moccasons, and gave me white wampum, and with that I crossed the lake, and went from town to town, and everywhere I showed the people this,"—and the wrinkled woman extended her hand to me; but, at the instant, Saul lifted the tent-curtain and came in. She hid her hand under her blanket, and, wrapping it closely about her, walked out without a glance to testify that ever she had spoken.
Saul asked me the cause of this visit, and I was about to tell him, when there arose in the lodges without such screams and cries as brought all the population into the air. The Indian woman who so lately had left my tent lay on the ground, in the apparent extreme of agony.
"Let the pale-face come," said the knot of savages around her; "it is for her she calls."
My husband interpreted the words for me, and in doubt and fear I went to her. Her screams had ceased; she held her hands tightly over her heart, as if there had been the spasms of pain. She rolled her eyes around to see if any one was within hearing, and then said,—
"I had fear that you would tell him; stay a little, and let me tell you now. I went on after Luella until I found her. I had the name of the white man to guide me. She was living as the pale-faces live, in a great town of many lodges.
"I saw with my eyes that she was happy, and then I walked many moons back to the Huron, and rowed across the lake in a canoe that I found in the woods.
"Luella came back again. I don't know how she found the way alone, but she came into the wigwam when the leaves were falling, and before the buds grew again she went to Uncas in the West. I asked her about the white man, and she shook her head and hid her eyes. I asked her for the boy, and she threw open her arms wide, to show me he was not there. Look!" said the woman, "I am dying; I'm very old; I ought to have walked with Luella this long time. Listen,—let me teach you. The pale face that you look into has eyes like my Luella. Take care! When he would walk under the stars alone, go not with him. When he would hunt bison, give him all the prairie; don't stand at the wigwam-door to keep him in. And when you are far away beyond my people, you may see this,"—and she handed to me the small parcel from close to her wild heart. I took it.
"You'll keep it for Luella's sake. She held it close when she went away; now I'm going, there's no one else to care. Bring it with you, when the Great Spirit calls."
I could win no more words from the woman. She spoke to those who came to her, and Saul said she told them that I had "taken away the torment."
"I shall think my Lucy witches somebody beside poor Saul," said my husband; and he gave a sigh as he stood in the tent-door, and watched the westering moon for the last time.
In the morning they told us that the Prophetess had gone into the light beyond the Sun.
Saul went in to see her, and as he came back to me I saw that he was not in a mood for words. Our farewell was very silent. Meotona went with us. Once again, bounding over the prairie, my heart grew lighter than it had been for many days; but I had no opportunity to examine Luella's treasure.
We met the long caravan of wagons on the summit of the Great Divide, and it was joy to unite my fate once more with that of my countrymen. Saul saw this, and said,—
"Know now, Lucy, that you have the portion meted out to me, when I saw the freemen of the wild coming. Your pleasure is that of civilization; mine was that of barbaric life. I bid adieu to it henceforth,"—and my brave husband, at this instant, looked out upon the head-waters of the Neosho, where Nature, when she built up the world, must have made a storehouse of material, and never came back for her treasures, they lie so magnificently rolled over the land.
Saul's eyes gathered up the view, as if they were, what they are, memory's absorbents, and said, sadly,—
"It is for the last time, Lucy!"
We went into corral the next evening by the side of a grassy mound covered with low-growing shrubs.
Afterwards Saul wandered out alone. I would have gone with him; but at the instant I put my face outside the tent-door, the memory of the Indian woman's caution came to me, and with it the opportunity to examine Luella's secret.
I entered my tent, lighted the little lamp that had travelled a thousand miles and never done service till now, and opened Luella's treasure. It was wrapped in soft white fur, bound about with the long, dried grass that grows beside the Huron. A scroll of parchment was rolled within it, faded, yellow, and old. I opened it, with a smile at my strange inheritance.
At the first glance, I thought I had before me some Indian hieroglyphics; but bringing back from the place of its long obscurity the little knowledge of the French language that I held in possession, I deciphered, that, "fourscore years before, beside the froth of the Huron Water, Father Kino had performed the marriage-rite upon Luella, daughter of Uncas, of the Dacotahs, and Richard Monten, of Montreal." Below the certificate of the priest of the Church were strange characters beyond my power to decipher.
With trembling I looked out for Saul's return. Here, upon the banks of the Neosho, I had learned the secret which my life in the East had hidden so long.
A certain kind, of guiltiness came over me, as Saul drew near, breaking down with every tread the sun-cured grass,—a sense of unworthiness, to hold in my hand a possession which essentially was his, and which he had not freely given me.
"I will not look into his eyes with a veil lying in the air," I said, very quietly to myself; and so, when my husband saw the burning of the little lamp and asked the cause, I told him all the story of the Indian woman, and put into his hand her gift to me. Saul's mind was preoccupied; he paid very little attention to the story; but when I gave him the white-furred scroll, and he opened it, then the grave professor–Well, it is better that I do not put into words what followed, even here, on the Big Blue.
An hour afterwards Saul spoke. He said,—
"Lucy, you have given me the key of my life, I knew my Indian blood, but I knew not whence it came; therefore I said nothing to you. I remember being tormented by it, when a boy, but never knew by what right. Let me translate for you this Indian register of—let me see—my grandmother's marriage. 'Ten moons from the lost moon, and many sleeps from the life of the big Huron Water, the Great Spirit called Luella to walk with a son of the Pale-Faces. The mystery [the priest] met them, and told them to go on to the Sun. They are gone in the path of the lost moons.'"
"Let us go to Skylight by the way of Montreal," I suggested.
Saul said, "It is well."
At the Missouri I laid aside my prairie costume, and assumed the raiment of fashion.
We found in Canada pleasant people bearing our name, and they welcomed us as relatives.
Richard Monten lay beside a fixed cloud of marble; and although Luella's sister had said she died far away, yet her name was beneath her husband's.
Tradition told us of the beautiful Indian wife with eyes like light,—and how her husband took her, every year, alone with him into the wilds,—and how, when they came back, and the winter snows fell, she would sit all day beside him, with her eyes on figures and letters, whilst her impatient fingers were threading her long hair, and memory shook her head at the attempted education, perhaps wisely and well.
When Mr. Monten died, and left her houses and lands, she turned away from them all, and, leading her boy by the hand, went out of her home and was seen no more until long after, when Father Kino, a kind old priest, going home late one night from a dying soul, in passing the cloud of marble, heard faint moans coming out of it, and, going near, found an Indian woman, in festive dress, like a chief's daughter, kneeling there. A few minutes afterwards, when Father Kino came back with an assistant, there were no more moans, for Luella had "gone on to the Sun."
The fate of the little boy was never known until then, and then it was only known that he had lived and died and was buried in Skylight.
We found houses and lands, but no record that they were ours. So we left them under British rule, and returned to Skylight, to our cottage and duty.
Aunt Carter came in before we had been an hour at home. I think she watched the opportunity of Saul's absence to find me alone.
"See!" she exclaimed, holding up to my view a small eminence of stockings, "see what I have done, while you've just been going about the world doing nothing at all!" And with a really warm shake of my hand, Aunt Carter seated herself, for the second time, in Saul's chair.
"Why, I've been knitting too!" I said, in extenuation.
"What?" asked Aunt Carter. "Some new-fashioned thing or other, I'll warrant."
"No,—something that is as old as Eve."
"Who ever beard of Eve's knitting? The Bible doesn't say one word about it, Mrs. Monten. Besides, I don't think little Cain and Abel wore stockings at all."
"I did not say that Eve knit in Paradise. I only said I'd been knitting at something as old as Eve. I meant the thread of life. Here comes my husband to tell you how industrious I have been."
Saul led Aunt Carter on to talk of her youth, and gradually of his father, until he had learned all that she knew of his history. It was very little: only that a fur-trader and a party of Dacotahs came to the village, she had heard her father say, to sell their skins, bringing a brown little boy with them; that the child fell sick with scarlet fever, and they left him to the mercy of the village people, and never came back for him, although they had said they would.
Did Luella give her boy away?—Never, I was convinced, and Saul likewise.
Saul went back into his round of professional duties, and with much heart for a while.
Delighted with civilization, and peopled with memories, and joyous with the divine plumage ever hovering around me, my life ran on. I watched Saul narrowly. He would often take up his hat, after hours of application to science, and rush out of the house, as if a mission lay before him. He would come back, and devote himself to me, as if he were conscious of some neglect in his absence. I planned short excursions all over the adjacent country. I became addicted to angling, because I saw Saul liked it. There were many righteous eyeballs that reproved me for wandering in places not fit for a woman, and Aunt Carter became exceedingly disturbed, even to the point of remonstrance.
"You're spoiling your husband," she would say,—"he'll not know but what you are a squaw," she said to me one day, in true distress.
However, I endured it delightfully for three years. Saul received in one week four letters, each containing the offer of a professor's chair in a desirable institution.
For many months I had seen the spell weaving around my good husband; I had seen it flash out of his eyes; I had heard its undertone in his voice; I had felt it in his whole manner, and I knew the hour of battle was near.
I was strong, and I came to the rescue. It was on this wise. Hearken! is he coming? No, it is only the wind coming up the Big Blue.
We sat in our Skylight door in an April evening,—unwise, perhaps,—but we were there. Saul had taken down that wild warble of Longfellow's, "Hiawatha." He read to me until the moon came up; then he threw down the book, and said, "Pshaw!"
"What is that for, Saul?" I asked, in some surprise.
"It is not for the book,—for myself, Lucy. I had better not have opened it Let us go and talk with the Doctor." And we went.
Saul had not answered his letters on the chair question, and I put up a petition.
"I think I never felt so well as when I was in Kansas," I said. "Really, Saul, I've felt a strong inclination to cough for some time, every morning. The climate of Kansas is wonderfully curative for pulmonary difficulties. I wish you would go out there now, and build a log cabin, plant a few miles of maize, gather it in, and then, when the season is over, come back and go to –. You know they value you too highly not to wait your time."
I saw a slow kindling up in Saul's eyes, but an instant later it had gone down, and he said, looking into mine,—
"Do you really and truly wish this, Lucy?"
And Lucy answered,—
"I really and truly wish it, Saul."
We came hither with the violets and bluebirds. My wigwam points to the sky. We have roamed on the prairies, and wandered in the timber-lands. Under the heavens of the Big Blue we have drunk "the wine of life all day," and "been lighted off" to hemlock-boughs "by the jewels in the cup."
Oh, this life that is passing, passing in unseen marches on to the Great Plains where we shall corral forever! I've just opened my cabin-door to look for Saul; he's been gone ten days. The drought came; our maize withered and died. Ten miles away, there is a town; two houses are there. We left our vast-wilderness lodge to Nature in October, and turned our faces eastward. Reaching the town, we found Azrael hovering there. It was impossible to go on and leave such suffering, and we stayed. While we waited, winter came along, tossing her white mail over the prairie, and we were prisoned. Azrael folded his pinions, and carried in them two souls out of the town of two houses. Afterward, Saul and I came back to our home. I kindled the fire, and Saul went forth to earn our daily food. Life began to grow painfully earnest. The supply of wheaten flour waxed less and less, and I sometimes wished—no, I did not wish that I was a widow, I only wished for flour.
I began to look for manna, and it came,—not "small and white, about the size of coriander-seed," but in the form of the flying life of yesterday.
I have cried many tears over eyes that were shut for me, but I've never been sorry that I came hither.
At last, no more wings came flying over the prairie. Saul came home without food. That was ten days ago. He carried me the next morning to the village, to leave me there, till he should return,—then retraced the ten miles through the snow, and went for food.
I stayed until there was no more for the children to eat. I could not abide that, and this morning I stole away. I've come the ten miles through the snow to light the fire, that Saul may not pass by, and go on to the town this cold night. Where is he now? Not perishing, dying on the prairie, as I was once, when he found me? I'll walk and see. It is so lone outside, there is such an awful sound in the voice of stillness, and Saul is not in sight!
Where is my life now? Since Saul went away, so much of it has gone, I feel as if more of myself were there than here. Why couldn't I go on thinking? It was such relief! The moon is up at last. A low rumble over the dried grass, like a great wave treading on sand. I am faint. I have tightened my dress, to keep out hunger, every hour of this day. Those starving children! God pity them! A higher wave of sound,—surely 'tis not fancy. I will look out. The moon shines on a prairie sail, a gleam of canvas. Another roll of the broad wheel, and Saul is here.
"Send the man on quickly," I cried; "the children are starving in the town."
"And you?" said Saul.
The power of his eyes is almost gone. I scarcely heed them. I see—a bag of meal.
NAPOLEON THE THIRD
On the 6th of October, 1840, a young man was brought up for sentence in one of the highest courts of Europe, before which he had been tried, and by which he had been found guilty of one of the greatest crimes that can be charged upon any human being, though the world seldom visits it with moral condemnation. The young man was Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the court was the French Chamber of Peers, and the sentence was imprisonment for life. Had the French government of that day felt strong enough to act strongly, the condemned would have been treated as the Neapolitans treated Murat, and as the Mexicans treated Yturbide. He would have been perpetually imprisoned, but his prison would have been "that which the sexton makes." But the Orleans dynasty was never strong, and its head was seldom able to act boldly. To execute a Bonaparte, the undoubted heir of the Emperor, required nerve such as no French government had exhibited since that day on which Maréchal Ney had been shot; and there were seven hundred thousand foreign soldiers in France when that piece of judicial butchery was resolved upon. The army might not be ready to join a Bonaparte, but it could not be relied upon to guard the scaffold on which he should be sent to die. The people might not be ready to overthrow Louis Philippe, to give his place to Louis Napoleon, but it did not follow that they would have seen the latter's execution with satisfaction, because they desired peace, and he had fallen into the habit of breaking it. The enthusiasm that was created in France by the arrival in that country of the remains of Napoleon I., not three months after the coming Napoleon III. had been sent to the fortress of Ham, showed how difficult a matter it would have been to proceed capitally against the Prince. Louis Philippe has been praised for sparing him; but the praise is undeserved. Certainly, the King of the French was not a cruel man, and it was with sincere regret that he signed the death-warrants of men who had sought his own life, and who had murdered his friends; but it would have been no act of cruelty, had he sent his rival to the guillotine. When a man makes a throw for a crown, he accepts what is staked, against it,—a coffin. Nothing is better established than this, that, when a sovereign is assailed, the intention of the assailant being his overthrow, that sovereign has a perfect right to put his rival to death, if he succeed in obtaining possession of his person. The most confirmed believer in Richard III.'s demoniac character would not think of adding the execution of Richmond to his crimes, had Plantagenet, and not Tudor, triumphed on Bosworth Field. James II. has never been blamed for causing Monmouth to be put to death, but for having complied with his nephew's request for a personal interview, at which he refused to grant his further request for a mitigation of punishment. Murat's death was an unnecessary act, but Ferdinand of Naples has never been censured for it. Had Louis Philippe followed these examples, and those of a hundred similar cases, he could not have been charged with undue severity in the exercise of his power for the conservation of his own rights, and the maintenance of the tranquillity, not of France alone, but of Europe, and of the world, which the triumph of a Bonaparte might have perilled. He spared the future Emperor's life, not from any considerations of a chivalric character, but because he durst not take it. He feared that the blood of the offender would more than atone for his offence, and he would not throw into the political caldron so rich a material, dreading the effects of its presence there. Then the Orléans party and the Imperial party not only marched with each other, but often crossed and ran into each other; and it was not safe to run the risk of offending the first by an attempt to punish its occasional ally. There was, too, something of the ludicrous in the Boulogne affair, which enabled government to regard the chief offender with cheap compassion. Louis Philippe is entitled to no credit, on the score of mercy, for his conduct in 1840,—for the decision of the Court of Peers was his inspiration; but he acted wisely,—so wisely, that, if he had done as well in 1848, his grandson would at this moment have been King of the French, and the Emperor that is a wanderer, with nothing but a character for flightiness and a capacity for failure to distinguish him from the herd, while many would have regarded him as a madman. But the end was not then, and the hand of Fate was not even near that curtain which was to be raised for the disclosure of events destined to shake and to change the world.
The defence of Louis Napoleon was conducted by M. Berryer, the great leader of the Legitimists, who, twenty-five years before, had aided in the defence of Ney, and who, nearly twenty years later, defended Montalembert, his client of 1840 being in this last case the prosecutor. In his speech in defence of the Prince, this first of French orators and advocates made use of language, the recollection of which in after-days must have been attended with very conflicting emotions. Addressing himself to the judges, he said,—"Standing where I do, I do not think that the claims of the name in which this project was attempted can possibly fall humiliated by the disdainful expressions of the Procureur Général. You make remarks upon the weakness of the means employed, of the poverty of the whole enterprise, which made all hope of success ridiculous. Well, if success is anything, I will say to you who are men,—you, who are the first men in the state,—you, who are members of a great political body,—there is an inevitable and eternal Arbitrator between every judge and every accused who stands before him;—before giving your judgment, now, being in presence of this Arbitrator, and in face of the country, which will hear your decrees, tell me this, without regard now to weakness of means, but with the rights of the case, the laws, and the institution before your eyes, and with your hands upon your hearts, as standing before your God, and in presence of us, who know you, will you say this:—'If he had succeeded, if his pretended right had triumphed, I would have denied him and it,—I would have refused all share in his power,—I would have denied and rejected him'? For my part, I accept the supreme arbitration I have mentioned; and whoever there may be amongst you, who, before their God, and before their country, will say to me,—'If he had succeeded, I would have denied him,'—such a one will I accept for judge in this case." In making this sweeping challenge, M. Berryer knew that he was hitting the Court of Peers hard, for it contained men who had been leading Napoleonists in the days of the Empire, and others who wore ready to join any government which should be powerful enough to establish itself; while it left the Legitimists, the orator's own party, unharmed. They were the only men, according to M. Berryer's theory of defence, who would have furnished an impartial tribunal for the trial of his client; for they alone, with strict truth, could have said that they would deny his right, and refuse to share in his power, no matter at what time he should succeed in accomplishing his designs.
Had the French Peers been gifted with that power of mental vision which enables men to see into the future, they would not have been disposed to condemn the man who stood before them in 1840. Could it have been made known to them that in eight years he would be elected President of the French Republic by nearly five and a half millions of votes,—that in twelve years he would become Emperor of the French,—that in fifteen years he would, as the ally of England, have struck down the Russian hegemony,—and that in twenty years he would be the conqueror of Austria, and have called the Kingdom of Italy into existence, while his enmity was dreaded and his friendship desired by all the nations of the earth, and the fate of the Popedom was in his hands,—had these things been so much as dreamed of by his judges, they would have formed the most lenient of tribunals, and have suffered him to depart in peace. They are not to be charged with a lack of wisdom in not foreseeing what must have appeared to be the ravings of lunacy, had it been deliberately set down by some inspired prophet. Neither the man nor his cause commanded much respect. We, who know that the French Emperor is the first man of the age, as well in intellect as in position, have no right to sneer at the men of 1840 because they looked upon him as a feeble pretender. He had made two attempts to place himself at the head of the French nation, and in each instance his failure had been so signal, and in some respects so ridiculous, that it was impossible to regard him as the representative of a living principle. Even those who thought him a man of talent could account for his want of success only by supposing that Imperialism was no longer powerful in France, and that his appeals were made to an extinct party. The soldiery, amongst whom the traditions of the Empire were supposed to be strong, had evinced no desire to substitute a Bonaparte for a Bourbon of the younger branch; and as to the peasantry, who showed themselves so fanatically Bonapartean in 1848, and in 1851-2, they were never thought of at all. France consisted of the government, the army, the bourgeoisie, and the skeleton colleges of electors; and so long as they were agreed, nothing was to be feared either from Prince Louis Napoleon or from the Comte de Chambord. We think this was a sound view of affairs, and that the French government of 1841 might have been the French government of 1861, had not the parties to the combination that ruled France in 1841 quarrelled. It was the loss of the support of the middle class that caused Louis Philippe to lose his throne in the most ignominious manner; and that support the monarch would not have forfeited, but for the persistence of M. Guizot in a policy which it would have been difficult to maintain under any circumstances, and which was enfeebled in 1847-8 by the gross corruption of some of its principal supporters. That the bourgeoisie intended to subvert the throne they had established, for the benefit of either the Republicans or the Imperialists, is not to be supposed; but their natural disgust with the wickedness of the government as it was at the beginning of 1848, and with the refusal of the minister to allow even the peaceful discussion of the reform question, was the occasion of the kingdom's fall, and of the establishment, first of the shadowy Republic, and then of the solid Empire.
The events of 1848 furnished to Louis Napoleon the place whereon to stand, whence to move the French world. He must have lived and died an exile, but for the Revolution of February. The ability with which he profited by events suffices to show that he is entitled to be considered a great man as well as a great sovereign. That he had been born in the purple, and that he bore a great name, and that through the occurrence of several deaths he had become the legitimate heir of Napoleon, were favorable circumstances, and helped not a little to promote his purpose; but they could not alone have made him Emperor of the French, and the world's arbiter. There must have been extraordinary talent in the man who aspired as he did, or he would have failed as completely in 1848 as he had failed in 1836 and in 1840. But the real power of the man came out as soon as he found a standing-place. Previously to 1848, he could act only as a criminal in seeking his proper place, as he believed it to be. He had first to conquer before he could attempt to govern,—and to conquer, too, with the means of his enemy. All this was changed in 1848. Then he was safe in France, as he had been in England, and began the political race on equal terms with such men as Cavaignac and Ledru-Rollin. That he soon passed far ahead of them was, perhaps, as much due to circumstances as to his political abilities. The name of Bonaparte was associated with the idea of the restoration of order and prosperity, and this helped him with that large class of persons, embracing both rich men and poor men, who not only believe that "order is Heaven's first law," but that under certain conditions it is the supreme law, for the maintenance of which all other laws are to be set aside and disregarded. These men, whose organ and exponent was M. César Romieu, who called so loudly for cannon to put down the revolutionists,—"even if it should come from Russia!"—and whose type of perfection is the churchyard, were all fanatical supporters of "the coming man," and they assisted him along the course with all their might and strength. No matter how swiftly he drove, his chariot-wheels seemed to them to tarry. The very arguments that were made use of to induce other men to act against the rising Bonaparte were those which had the most effect in binding them to his cause. He would establish a cannonarchy, would he? Well, a cannonarchy was exactly what they desired, provided its powers should be directed, not against foreign monarchs, but against domestic Republicans. That a government of which he should be the head would disregard the constitution, would shackle the press, would limit speech, and would suppress the Assembly, was an argument in his favor, that, to their minds, was irresistible. Had they thought of the Russian War, and of the Italian War, and of the extinction of the Pope's temporal power, and of the liberal home-policy that was adopted in 1860, as things possible to occur, Louis Napoleon would have remained Louis Napoleon to the end of his days, for all the support he would have received at their hands. They wished for a sort of high-constable, whose business it should be to maintain order by breaking the heads or seizing the persons of all who did not take their view of men's political duties. It is the custom to speak of this class of men as if they were peculiar to France, and to say that their existence there is one of the many reasons why that country can never long enjoy a period of constitutional liberty. This is not just to France. The French are a great people, who have their faults, but who are in no sense more servile than are Americans, or Englishmen, or Germans. Extreme disciples of order, men who are ready to sacrifice everything else for the privileges of making and spending or hoarding money in peace, are to be found in all countries; and nowhere are they more numerous, and nowhere is their influence greater or more noxious, than in the United States. The difference of populations considered, there are as many of them in Boston as in Paris; and our breed is ready to go as far in sacrificing freedom, and in treating right with contempt, as were their French brothers of 1848. The infirmity belongs, not to French nature, but to human nature.
