would be no dignity in life, it would not be worth the holding, if in death we wholly perish. All that lightens labor, and sanctifies toil, all that renders man brave, good, wise, patient, benevolent, just, hum. ble, and, at the same time, great, worthy of intelligence, worthy of liberty, is to have perpetually before him the vision of a better world darting its rays of celestial splendor through the dark shadows of this present life. For myself, since Chance will have it that words of such gravity should at this time fall from lips of such little authority, let me be per mitted here to say, and to proclaim from the elevation of this Tribune, that I believe, that I most profoundly and reverently believe, in that better world. It is to me more real, more substantial, more positive in its effects, than this evanescence which we cling to and call life. It is unceasingly before my eyes. I believe in it with all the strength of my convictions; and, after many struggles, and much study and experience, it is the supreme certainty of my reason, as it is the supreme consolation of my soul! I desire, therefore, most sincerely, strenuously and fervently, that there should be religious instruction; but let it be the instruction of the Gospel, and not of a party. Let it be sincere, not hypocritical Let it have Heaven, not earth, for its end! 29. UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE, MAY 20, 1850.-Victor Hugo. Original Translation. UNIVERSAL Suffrage! what is it but the overthrow of violence and brute force the end of the material and the beginning of the moral fact? What was the Revolution of February intended to establish in France, if not this? And now it is proposed to abolish this sacred right! And what is its abolition, but the reintroduction of the right of insurrection? Ye Ministers and men of State, who govern, wherefore do you venture on this mad attempt? I will tell you. It is because the People have deemed worthy of their votes men whom you judge worthy of your insults! It is because the People have presumed to compare your promises with your acts; because they do not find your Administration altogether sublime; because they have dared peaceably to instruct you through the ballot-box! Therefore it is, that your anger is roused, and that, under the pretence that Society is in peril, you seek to chastise the People, - to take them in hand! And so, like that maniac of whom History, tells, you beat the ocean with rods! And so you launch at us your poor little laws, furious but feeble! And so you defy the spirit of the age, defy the good sense of the public, defy the Democracy, and tear your unfortunate fingernails against the granite of universal suffrage! Go on, Gentlemen! Proceed! Disfranchise, if you will, three millions of voters, four millions, nay, eight millions out of nine! Get rid of all these! It will not matter. What you cannot get rid of is your own fatal incapacity and ignorance; your own antipathy for the People, and theirs for you! What you cannot get rid of is the time that marches, and the hour that strikes; is the earth that revolves, the onward movement of ideas, the crippled pace of prejudices; the widening gulf between you and the age, between you and the coming generation, between you and the spirit of liberty, between you and the spirit of philosophy! What you cannot get rid of is the great fact that you and the Nation pass on opposite sides; that what is to you the East is to her the West; and that, while you turn your back on the Future, this great People of France, their foreheads all bathed in light from the day-spring of a new humanity, turn their back on the Past! Ah! Whether you will it or no, the Past is passed. Your law is null, void and dead, even before its birth: because it is not just ; because it is not true; because, while it goes furtively to plunder the poor man and the weak of his right of suffrage, it encounters the withering glance of a Nation's probity and sense of right, before which your work of darkness shall vanish; because, in the depths of the conscience. of every citizen, of the humblest as well as the highest, - there is a sentiment sublime, sacred, indestructible, incorruptible, eternal, the Right! This sentiment, which is the very element of reason in man, the granite of the human conscience, this Right, is the rock upon which shall split and go to pieces the iniquitics, the hypocrisies, the bad laws and bad governments, of the world. There is the obstacle, concealed, invisible, lost to view in the soul's profoundest deep, but eternally present and abiding,- against which you shall always strike, and which you shall never wear away, do what you will! I repeat it, your efforts are in vain. You cannot deracinate, you cannot shake it. You might sooner tear up the eternal Rock from the bottom of the sea, than the Right from the heart of the People! 30. LIBERTY OF THE PRES, 185).—Original Translation from Victor Hugo. The man Press; it Yes, it is HAVING restricted universal suffrage and the right of public meetings, you now wage war against the liberty of the Press. In the crisis through which we are passing, it is asked, "Who is making all this trouble? Who is the culprit? Whom must we punish?" The alarm party in Europe say, "It is France!" In France they say, "It is Paris!" In Paris they say, "It is the Press! of observation and reflection says, "The culprit is not the is not Paris; it is not France; - it is the human mind!" the human mind, which has made the Nations what they are; which, from the beginning, has scrutinized, examined, discussed, debated, doubted, contradicted, probed, affirmed, and pursued without ceasing, the solution of the problem, eternally placed before the creature by the Creator. It is the human mind which, continually persecuted, opposed, driven back, headed off, has disappeared only to appear again; and, passing from one labor to another, has taken successively, from age to age, the figure of all the great agitators. It is the human mind, which was named John Huss, and which did not die on the funeral-pile of Constance; which was named Luther, and shook orthodoxy to its centre; which was named Voltaire, and shook faith; which was named Mirabeau, and shook royalty. It is the human mind, which, since history began, has transformed societies and governments according to a law progressively acceptable to the reason, -wrich has been theocracy, aristocracy, monarchy, and which is to-day democ racy. It is the human mind, which has been Babylon, Tyre, Jerusa lem, Athens, and which to-day is Paris; which has been, turn by turn, and sometimes all at once, error, illusion, schism, protestation truth; it is the human mind, which is the great pastor of the genera tions, and which, in short, has always marched towards the Just, the Beautiful and the True, enlightening multitudes, elevating life, raising more and more the head of the People towards the Right, and the head of the individual towards God! : And now I address myself to the alarm party,—not in this Chamber, but wherever they may be, throughout Europe, and I say to them: Consider well what you would do; reflect on the task that you have undertaken; and measure it well before you commence. Suppose you should succeed when you have destroyed the Press, there will remain something more to destroy, Paris! When you have destroyed Paris, there will remain France. When you have destroyed France, there will remain the human mind. I repeat it, let this great Euro pean alarm party measure the immensity of the task which, in their heroism, they would attempt. Though they annihilate the Press to the last journal, Paris to the last pavement, France to the last hamlet, they will have done nothing. There will remain yet for them to destroy something always paramount, above the generations, and, as it were, between man and his Maker; something that has written all the books, invented all the arts, discovered all the worlds, founded all the civilizations; something which will always grasp, under the form of Revolutions, what is not yielded under the form of progress; - something which is itself unseizable as the light, and unapproachable as the sun, and which calls itself the human mind! 31. A REPUBLIC OR A MONARCHY?-Original Translation from Victor Hugo On the question of revising the French Constitution, 1851. GENTLEMEN, let us come at the pith of this debate. It is not our side of the House, but you, the Monarchists, who have provoked it. The question, a Republic or a Monarchy, is before us. No one has any longer the power or the right to elude it. For more than two years, this question, secretly and audaciously agitated, has harassed the country. It weighs upon the Present. It clouds the Future. The moment has come for our deliverance from it. Yes, the moment has come for us to regard it face to face to see what it is made of. Now, then let us show our cards! No more concealment! I affirm then, in the name of the eternal laws of human morality, that Mon archy is an historical fact, and nothing more. Now, when the fact is extinct, nothing survives, and all is told. It is otherwise with right. Right, even when it no longer has fact to sustain it, even when it no longer exerts a material authority, preserves still its moral authority, and is always right. Hence is it that, in an overthrown Republic, there remains a right, while in a fallen Monarchy there remains only a ruin. Cease then, ye Legitimists, to appeal to us from the position of right! Before the right of the People, which is sovereignty, there is no other right but the right of the individ tal, which is liberty. Beyond that, all is a chimera. To talk of the kingly right in this great age of ours, and at this great Tribune, is to pronounce a word void of meaning. But, if you cannot speak in the name of right, will you speak in the name of fact? Will you say that political stability is the offspring of hereditary royalty, and that Royalty is better than Democracy for a State? What! You would have those scenes renewed, those experiences recommenced, which overwhelmed kings and princes: the feeble, like Louis the Sixteenth; the able and strong, like Louis Philippe; whole families of royal lineage, high-born women, saintly widows, innocent children! And of those lamentable experiences you have not had enough? You would have yet more? But you are without pity, Royalists, or without memory! We ask your mercy - This Place, does it, then, on these unfortunate royal families. Good Heavens! which you traverse daily, on your way to this House, teach you nothing?- when, if you but stamped on the pavement, two paces from those deadly Tuileries, which you covet still, but stamped on that fatal pavement, you could conjure up, at will, the SCAFFOLD from which the old Monarchy was plunged into the tomb, or the CAB in which the new royalty escaped into exile! Ah, men of ancient parties! you will learn, ere long, that at this present time, - in this nineteenth century, after the scaffold of Louis the Sixteenth, after the downfall of Napoleon, after the exile of Charles the Tenth, after the flight of Louis Philippe, after the French Revolution, in a word, that is to say, after this renewal, complete, absolute, prodigious, of principles, convictions, opinions, situations, influences, and facts, it is the Republic which is solid ground, and the Monarchy which is the perilous venture! - 32. THE TWO NAPOLEONS. —Original Translation from Victor Hugo. - THE monarchy of glory! There are a class of monarchists in France who now speak to us of a monarchy of glory. Legitimacy is impossible. Monarchy by right divine, the monarchy of principle, is dead; but there is another monarchy, the monarchy of glory, the Empire, we are told, which is not only possible, but necessary. This glory, where is it? What are its elements? Of what is it composed? I am curious to witness the glory which this present Govenment can rbow. What do we see? All our liberties, one after another, entrapped and bound; universal suffrage mutilated and betrayed socialist manifestoes terminating in a jesuitical policy; and, for a Gov ernment, one immense intrigue,- history, perchance, will call it a conspiracy, by which the Republic is to be made the basis of the Empire through the Bonapartist free-masonry of five hundred thousand office-holders; every reform postponed or smothered; burdensome taxes maintained or reestablished; the Press shackled; juries packed; too little justice and too much police; misery at the foot, anarchy at the head, of the social state. Abroad, the wreck of the Roman Republic, Austria that is to say, the gallows-with her foot upon Hungary upon Lombardy, upon Milan, upon Venice, a latent coalition of Kings, waiting for an opportunity; our diplomacy dumb, I will not say an accomplice! This is our situation. France bows her head; Napoleon quivers with shame in his tomb; and five or six thousand hirelings shout, "Vive l'empereur!"* tell us. What mean, then, What But nobody dreams of the Empire, you those cries of Vive l'empereur? and who pays for them? means this mendicant petition for a prolongation of the President's powers? What is a prolongation? The Consulate for life! And where leads the Consulate for life? To the Empire! Gentlemen, here is an intrigue. We will let in day-light upon it, if you please. France must not wake up, one of these fine mornings, and find herself emperor-ridden, without knowing why. An emperor! Let us consider the subject a little. Because there was once a man who gained the battle of Marengo, and who reigned, must the man who gained only the battle of Satory reign also? Because, ten centuries ago, Charlemagne, after forty years of glory, let fall on the face of the globe a sceptre and a sword of such proportions that no one dared to touch them; and because, a thousand years later, for it requires a gestation of a thousand years to produce such men, - another genius appeared, who took up that sword and sceptre, and stood up erect under the weight; a man who chained Revolution in France, and unchained it in the rest of Europe; who added to his name the brilliant synonyms of Rivoli, Jéna,t Essling, Friedland, Montmirail; because this man, after ten years of a glory almost fabulous in its grandeur, let fall, in his turn, that sceptre and sword which had accomplished such colossal exploits,-you would come, you, you would presume, after him, to catch them up as he did, he, Napoleon, after Charlemagne, - and grasp in your feeble hands this sceptre of the giants, this sword of the Titans! What to do? What! after Augustus must we have Augustulus? Because we have hal a Napoleon the Great, must we now have Napoleon the Little? 33. TIIE END OF GOVERNMENT, 1641.-John Pym. Born, 1583; died, 1643. MY LORDS, many days have been spent in maintenance of the impeachment of the Earl of Strafford by the House of Commons, whereby he stands charged with high treason; and your Lordships have heard his defence with patience, and with as much favor as jus Pronounced Veev L'aunpphrehr: † Yaynah. + Monahmerah.ed |