J. N. Larned

“ Netted with steam and electric railways, seamed with canals, wire-strung with telegraphic and telephonic lines, its ocean-voyages made holiday excursions, its every-day labors, of the forge, the plough, the sickle, the spindle, the loom, the needle, and even of the pen, done with magical deftness by machines, which its coal mines and its waterfalls lend forces to move, it is nothing less than a new world that men are making for themselves, out of that in which they lived at the beginning of the era of mechanism and electricity and steam. ”

“ There, too, the wealth of Spain and Gaul, the produce of Italy and Macedonia, the amber of the Baltic and the salt fish of Pontus, the silver of Spain and the copper of Cyprus, the timber of Macedonia and Crete, the pottery and oil of Greece--a thousand imports from all the Mediterranean--came to be exchanged for the spices of Arabia, the splendid birds and embroideries of India and Ceylon, the gold and ivory of Africa, the antelopes, the apes, the leopards, the elephants of tropical climes. ”

“ By the term Renaissance, or new birth, is indicated a natural movement, not to be explained by this or that characteristic, but to be accepted as an effort of humanity for which at length the time had come, and in the onward progress of which we still participate. The history of the Renaissance is not the history of arts, or of sciences, or of literature, or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races. It is no mere political mutation, no new fashion of art, no restoration of classical standards of taste. ”

“ Succeeding generations have remembered only the numerous victories, Europe defied, France for twenty years preponderant, and the incomparable splendor of the court of Versailles, with its marvels of letters and arts, which have given to the 17th century the name of the age of Louis XIV. It is for history to show the price which France has paid for her king's vain attempts abroad to rule over Europe, and at home to enslave the wills and consciences of men. ”

“ In no other man on record were so many virtues disfigured by so little alloy. A saint without superstition, a scholar without ostentation, a warrior all whose wars were fought in the defense of his country, a conqueror whose laurels were never stained by cruelty, a prince never cast down by adversity, never lifted up to insolence in the day of triumph—there is no other name in history to compare with his. ... The virtue of Alfred, like the virtue of Washington, consisted in no marvelous displays of superhuman genius, but in the simple, straight-forward discharge of the duty of the moment. ”

“ The eye of man only perceives the wonder after it has been finished. Thus from the 15th century, which is the beginning of the third and last Age of Medicine, or the Age of Renovation, Europe offers us a spectacle of which the most glorious eras of the republics of Greece and Rome only can give us an idea. It would seem as if a new life was infused into the veins of the inhabitants of this part of the world; the sciences, fine arts, industry, religion, social institutions, all are changed. A multitude of schools are open for teaching Medicine. ”

“ These buildings which stretch across a frontage of twelve hundred yards, the unheard-of luxury of these endless apartments, this incredible multitude of objects of art, these forests transplanted, these waters of heaven gathered from all the slopes of the heights into the windings of immense conduits from Trappes and Palaiseau to Versailles, these waters of the Seine brought from Marly by gigantic machinery through that aqueduct which commands from afar the valley of the river like a superb Roman ruin, and later, an enterprise far more colossal! ”

“ In the teeth of an organised and concentrated despotism a new society had grown up, self-supporting, self-regulated, a State within the State. Calm and assured amid a world that hid its fears only in blind excitement, free amid the servile, sanguine amid the despairing, Christians lived with an object. United in loyal fellowship by sacred pledges more binding than the sacramentum of the soldier, welded together by a stringent discipline, led by trained and tried commanders, the Church had succeeded in attaining unity. ”

“ Why, if it impressed the Greek mind so deeply with the reality of the objects of faith, did it not also check the vain inquisitiveness and spirit of disputatiousness and sophistry, which filled Greek Church history with furious wranglings about the most hopeless problems? Why, if it could raise such admiration for unselfishness and heroic nobleness, has not this admiration borne more congenial fruit? Why, if heaven was felt to be so great and so near, was there in real life such coarse and mean worldliness? ”

“ A growth of fellow-feeling which began in the last century has been an increasing growth. It has not ended war, nor the passions that cause war, but it is rousing an opposition which gathers strength every year. It has made democratic institutions of government so common that the few arbitrary governments now remaining in civilized countries seem disgraceful to the people who endure them so long. It has broken old yokes of conquest, and revived the independence of long subjugated states. It has swept away unnatural boundary lines, which separated peoples of kindred language and race. ”

“ For two or three centuries the annals of Florence are naught, one thinks in reading them, but an unbroken tale of strife within, or war without--of tumult, riot, revolution, disorder. And yet, underneath, there is an amazing story to be found, of thrift, industry, commerce, prosperity, wealth, on one side, and of the sublimest genius, on another, giving itself, in pure devotion, to poetry and art. The contradiction of circumstances seems irreconcilable to our modern experience, and we have to seek an explanation of it in the very different conditions of mediæval life. ”

“ The horrors of the retreat form one of the darkest passages in English military history. In bitter cold and snow, which took all life out of the wretched Sepoys, without proper clothing or shelter, and hampered by a disorderly mass of thousands of camp-followers, the army entered the terrible defiles which lie between Cabul and Jellalabad. Whether Akbar Khan could, had he wished it, have restrained his fanatical followers is uncertain. As a fact the retiring crowd—it can scarcely be called an army—was a mere unresisting prey to the assaults of the mountaineers. ”

“ What enthusiasm prevailed when France proclaimed the equality of everything that bears human form, when the prophecies of Rousseau, who spoke as no other Frenchman could, to the hearts, to the courage, to the ideals of the German youth, seemed about to be realized! All the cravings of the time, the noble eagerness to recognize the dignity of man and the heaven-storming defiance of the sovereign ego, found themselves satisfied by the bold sophism of the Genevan philosopher who declared that, in a condition of absolute equality, everyone should obey himself only. ”

“ Even the detractors who defend her conduct on the plea that she was a dastard and a dupe are compelled in the same breath to retract this implied reproach, and to admit, with illogical acclamation and incongruous applause, that the world never saw more splendid courage at the service of more brilliant intelligence; that a braver if not 'a rarer spirit never did steer humanity.' A kinder or more faithful friend, a deadlier or more dangerous enemy, it would be impossible to dread or to desire. Passion alone could shake the double fortress of her impregnable heart and ever active brain. ”

“ In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half-awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. ”

“ This will be the world’s formal and final acceptance of the declaration that no part of the American continents is to be deemed subject to colonization. Let us pledge ourselves to aid each other in the full performance of the duty to humanity which that accepted declaration implies; so that in time the weakest and most unfortunate of our republics may come to march with equal step by the side of the stronger and more fortunate. Let us help each other to show that for all the races of men the liberty for which we have fought and labored is the twin sister of justice and peace. ”

“ Other Committees of the Assembly, Juries on a gigantic scale, with a presiding magistrate as chairman rather than as Judge, are therefore set apart to decide causes and to sit in judgment on offenders. Such is pure Democracy, the government of the whole people and not of a part of it only, as carried out in its full perfection in a single city. It is a form of government which works up the faculties of man to a higher pitch than any other; it is the form of government which gives the freest scope to the inborn genius of the whole community and of every member of it. ”

“ But no sooner had a Kingdom of Germany been created than it was strangely deprived of the distinctness needful to the making of a nation. The adventurous Otho, its second Saxon king, who reclaimed Italy and revived the imperial sovereignty of Charlemagne, diminished the weight and dignity of his Germanic realm as much as he advanced himself and his successors in title and rank. By that elevation of its kings to a pseudo-Roman throne, Germany lost its own proper place in history, and was obscured by the shadow of an empire which soon existed as a shadow only. ”

“ Can we, therefore, for the mere election of a man to the presidency, and that, too, in accordance with the prescribed forms of the constitution, make a point of resistance to the government, without becoming the breakers of that sacred instrument ourselves, by withdrawing ourselves from it? Would we not be in the wrong? Whatever fate is to befall this country, let it never be laid to the charge of the people of the South, and especially to the people of Georgia, that we were untrue to our national engagements. Let the fault and the wrong rest upon others. ”

“ To the defenders of the gold standard of value—the monetary standard of the world at large—an unlimited free coinage of silver legal tender money, at the ratio of 16 to 1, meant both dishonor and ruin—national bankruptcy, the wreck of industry, and chaos in the commercial world. To many of those who strove with desperate eagerness to bring it about it meant, on the contrary, a millennial social state, in which abundance would prevail, the goods of the world be divided more fairly, and labor have a juster reward. So the issue fronted each as one personal, vital, almost as of life and death. ”

“ Italy lay prostrate and miserable under the Lombard invasion; the invaders now threatened Rome itself, and its inhabitants trembled; famine and pestilence within the city produced a climax of distress; an overflow of the Tiber at the time aggravated the general alarm and misery; Gregory himself, in one of his letters, compares Rome at this time to an old and shattered ship, letting in the waves on all sides, tossed by a daily storm, its planks rotten and sounding of wreck. In this state of things all men's thoughts at once turned to Gregory. ”

“ The city which Rome in her jealousy had crushed, which, not content with crushing, she had obliterated from the face of the earth, had at the bidding of Rome's greatest son risen from her ashes, and by her career almost verified the poet's taunt that the greatness of Carthage was reared on the ruin of Italy. For in truth the African capital was in all but political power no unworthy rival of Rome. It had steadily grown in commercial prosperity. Its site was so advantageous as to invite, almost to compel, the influx of trade, which ever spontaneously moves along the line of least resistance. ”

“ The age of Elizabeth was distinguished beyond, perhaps, any other in our history by a number of great men, famous in different ways, and whose names have come down to us with unblemished honours: statesmen, warriors, divines, scholars, poets, and philosophers; Raleigh, Drake, Coke, Hooker, and--high and more sounding still, and still more frequent in our mouths--Shakespear, Spenser, Sidney, Bacon, Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher, men whom fame has eternised in her long and lasting scroll, and who, by their words and acts, were benefactors of their country, and ornaments of human nature. ”

“ Sir, the martial spirit, I should be the last to deny, has its place, and its proper place, in the life of a nation. That the nation should take pride in its power to resist force by force is a natural and wholesome thing. It is a source of perfectly healthy pride to have soundness of wind and limb and physical strength, and it has no unworthy part in the national spirit. That I sympathize with entirely, but I would ask the people to consider to what consequences the growth of armaments has led. ”

“ Have we the right to crush and hold under our feet an unwilling and subject people whom we had treated as allies, whose independence we are bound in good faith to respect, who had established their own free government, and who had trusted us? ”

“ At the same time, I assert the authority of this kingdom over the colonies to be sovereign and supreme, in every circumstance of government and legislation whatsoever. They are the subjects of this kingdom; equally entitled with yourselves to all the natural rights of mankind and the peculiar privileges of Englishmen; equally bound by its laws, and equally participating in the constitution of this free country, The Americans are the sons, not the bastards of England! Taxation is no part of the governing or legislative power. The taxes are a voluntary gift and grant of the Commons alone. ”

“ How contrary is this doctrine to the Catholic dogma of the full power divinely given to the sovereign Pontiff by our Lord Jesus Christ, to guide, to supervise, and govern the universal church, no one can fail to see and understand clearly and evidently. Amid so great a diversity of depraved opinions, we, remembering our apostolic duty, and solicitous before all things for our most holy religion, for sound doctrine, for the salvation of the souls confided to us, and for the welfare of human society itself, have considered the moment opportune to raise anew our apostolic voice. ”