William Henry Furness

“ If we must suffer, when public events go wrong, it is best by far to suffer for something. For in times of universal alarm and disorder, when property and life are put in peril, they suffer the least, though they lose everything, who are inspired by the conviction that they have tried to be faithful and to do their duty. They have a life in them which bullets and bayonets and cannon-balls cannot reach. When men perish for a cause to which they were utterly indifferent, for which they cared nothing, of which they knew nothing, then they perish as the brutes perish. ”

“ A robber-hand has seized the great French nation, and flung it down into the dust to be trampled upon at pleasure. At such startling tidings, what man is there so humble or so weak, who can repress the solemn appeal to God, which must rise instinctively from every heart of flesh? Who can help having his attention arrested and engrossed? Who does not long to be saying something, doing something, or suffering something, for the outraged rights, the imperilled interests of our Common Humanity, our One Nature? ”

“ They can say, with truth, that Liberty does not exist here or anywhere as a realized fact; that it is a chimera and an abstraction, utterly impracticable; that the people are longing for a dream that has never been and can never be fulfilled. Neither the foreign oppressor, nor the foreign oppressed have any foundation in fact for the faith and the hope of liberty; and much I fear we should do little for the deliverance of other nations, even if, as we now stand, clinging to Slavery, we were actually to intervene in their behalf. ”

“ With such facts as I began with mentioning, glaring in our faces, sickening our very hearts with horror and indignation, who will say that public affairs may not interfere with us, with our very lives, yes, and with what ought to be dearer to us than our lives? Let them take their own course, as you say. And then, as surely as we breathe, bad men will gain the ascendency,—ignorant, unprincipled, ambitious men, despisers of human life and human rights, ready to shed blood to any extent to gratify the devilish lust of power. Into such hands will public affairs fall. ”

“ If we fling our whole hearts with a generous ardor into the conflict [Pg 13] for the welfare of our brother, seeing to it with all vigilance that public affairs go wisely and justly, then if the fortunes of this good cause prosper, it is well with us; we triumph with it. But if it should be defeated, and we should be involved in its defeat, and suffer danger, loss, and even death itself, still how powerfully should we be sustained by the consciousness of suffering in so grand a behalf, for such a glorious reason! ”

“ For this reason it is, that I said just now, that those quiet people who have been killed in the streets of Paris, could not have perished so miserably had they taken an active interest in the great public question of Liberty. Then they would have had a spring of life in their own hearts; then they would have suffered for a cause for which it is worth any man's while to suffer, and die any death that a relentless power might inflict.
I know that it is a very wise injunction, that every man should mind his own business ”

“ How could he have dreamed that a people who had made such a solemn declaration of human rights before all the world, a people so lavish in the praise of Liberty, were clinging with such desperation to Oppression, as if it were the very life and soul of their Union and their Power. ”

“ We should be lost to the ordinary feelings of men, if we could remain silent when political events are arresting and absorbing public attention, and threatening to rouse all the passions of the human heart, and to shake the earth out of its place. This present time, in which we are living, is no holiday, when a man can throw himself down in the shade, and dream his soul away. ”

“ But when men suffer and die for a cause, into which they have thrown their whole souls, when they perish for a principle, then their death is noble, and they do not die like the brutes, but like men. Then they are heroes and martyrs, and [Pg 11] though dead, they speak with mighty angel voices; and their blood hallows for ever the spot on which it is shed, 'down to earth's profound, and up to Heaven,' and they become immortal in the affection and reverence of mankind, and in the influence which they exert upon the course of human affairs. ”

“ But if the indifference to public affairs, which is now confined only to a class—only to a portion of the people—to too large a portion, indeed, but still only to a portion,—if it were to become general, if things were allowed to go on their way, without any interest taken in them by private persons, by those whose intelligence goes to create a commanding public opinion, then you would soon find your private interests, the comfort and lives of individuals, threatened and assailed. ”

“ No matter how much he may have been told, and he is in nothing more remarkable than in the extent of his information, he has not yet known—he cannot know—it could not have entered into his generous heart to imagine, that this Domestic Institution of ours is the one thing that exerts the most marked and predominating influence on our domestic and our foreign policy. He does not see, but he must, that it is the one thing that will make his appeal to our National Government utterly in vain, and that his silence in regard to it will avail him nothing. ”

“ Already, well off as we may be in comparison with other nations, have not our public concerns, through the criminal neglect and insensibility of the people, taken such a direction as, if it does not put us in peril of having our blood spilt in the streets, yet endangers the sacred rights of Free Thought and Free Speech, and makes it hazardous to property and to personal liberty to obey the plainest dictates of humanity? ”

“ The nations of the old world, degraded, trampled upon, and bleeding under the relentless feet of arbitrary power, long and pray for emancipation. The glorious vision of Liberty flits before their aching sight. They stretch out their hearts and hands to us. ”

“ Show mankind twenty-five millions of human beings, living together under such free and simple institutions as ours, with not a single slave among them, and then all that we need do is done, and our simple existence as a nation becomes an irresistible intervention against the violation of human rights. ”

“ Now, I refer to these facts, not to harrow up your feelings, my hearers, but because these facts, and such as these, speak trumpet-tongued, as to the vital interest and the sacred religious duty which every private man, no matter how humble and obscure,—nay, which every woman has, in those great questions that agitate nations, in what are designated as matters of public concern and the public welfare. ”

“ There is some excuse for the people of France, ground down as they have been by ages of oppression, denied the right to think, to judge, to act for themselves, made to believe that their rulers held their power by the grace of God—there is some excuse for them. ”

“ Why, my hearers, it is because this simple and indestructible fact is not seen; because individuals are for ever trying to live, and work, and enjoy, not with and for, but at the expense of, their fellow-men, that things are so continually getting out of joint, and the world is so full of uproar and misery. My brothers, we are all One; and if we are resolved to mind each his own business, we must attend to the business which God and nature have given to us. We must interest ourselves in the cause of our common humanity. ”

“ O how plain is it that the one thing which the world claims of us, the one thing that the great Hungarian has to ask of us, for his own people and for all Europe, is that we should prove that Liberty without Slavery is a practicable thing. Let this fact be realized, and the world's redemption is sure. ”

“ It may be that the influence he is exerting is yet to penetrate the rock of our selfishness and insensibility, and call forth, in full flood, like one of our own great rivers, the mighty stream of our sympathy that shall sweep away from our land and from the earth, every vestige of oppression. ”

“ The simple, religious truth is, and the sooner every [Pg 9] man accepts it, and makes up his mind and his life to it, the better for him, for our country, and for the world—the plain truth is, that 'no man liveth or can live to himself'—that the interests, the highest interests, the personal character and salvation, the very life of the individual, in the most obvious and in the profoundest sense of the word, life, is wrapt up with the interests of the whole; in other words, with the public interest, with public affairs. ”

“ We may choose whether or not we will act; but the consequences, and they may be most deadly,—the consequences of our action or our no-action we cannot escape. They may fall upon us with a crushing power at our very firesides, and ruin our private and domestic peace for ever. ”

“ So, then, the fact that private men are interested in public affairs, even though it be attended with a good deal of excitement,—that is not the thing to be deplored. But what is to be lamented is, that false way of thinking, out of place in this country, out of time in this age, by which thousands justify themselves in continuing ignorant and indifferent to things of a vital private concern, simply because they are of a public and general character. What is more common than to hear men say, in reference to such matters, 'They are no concerns of ours. ”

“ Because a man keeps himself retired, never reading, never thinking about what is going on on the public theatre of the [Pg 10] world, he has no security against being shot down like a dog in the streets, as the case of those unfortunate citizens of Paris shows.
Certainly then, since we are liable to suffer from public affairs taking a wrong direction, whether we take an interest in them or not, it is worth our while to suffer for a cause. There is small comfort in incurring danger and in losing one's life for nothing. ”

“ But, whatever may be their excuse, there can be no doubt that it is the ignorance, the indifference, the cowardice, the selfishness of the people at large that have caused their public affairs to wade so often towards a settlement, through such frightful streams of [Pg 7] innocent and unoffending blood. Here, in our land, the peace and security of private life are as fully and extensively insured as they are, precisely for this reason, because of the lively and general interest which the people in their private capacity take in things of public concern. ”

“ We cannot—no man can separate himself and stand apart, and insist upon being ignorant and indifferent. It lies within our own will to say, whether we will meet and endeavor to answer the claims which the welfare of the whole has upon us, whether we will take a lively interest in the public interest ”

“ In this country more than in any other, the people keep a watchful and commanding eye upon public matters. And, with all the excitement and agitation which it involves, it is the great pledge of our private and personal security. ”

“ And then there is no man—there is no woman, so retired but she shall find to her cost, that she has an interest, the very deepest,—that her all is involved in these things,—that they may tear from her her father, her husband, her brother or her son, aye, and her own life also, which she is pampering so delicately. ”

“ Christians, to take a hearty, intelligent, self-sacrificing interest in what is going on on the public theatre of the nation to which you belong, and of the world to which you belong as well, and in whose fortunes, we are every one of us so deeply interested. ”

“ And cold indeed must be our hearts, we are not worthy to live at so momentous, so unprecedented a period, if we refuse to be reminded of those indissoluble ties of a common nature and a common interest, which the course of things is laying bare to all men's view. ”

“ As you are men, human beings, your hearts must beat with a new and stirring sympathy for the great Public [Pg 15] of Christendom, of which you are each an inseparable portion, when you see the second great nation of Europe, after all the terrible experience of the last three-quarters of a century, again falling prostrate in the dust beneath the blow of a base usurper, with no great exploits at his back to extenuate the insolence of the brutal deed ”

“ Then death comes to them as a fatal accident; and the only moral that can be drawn from their fate, is that it is folly for men to think to live unto themselves. No glory shines from their graves; no renown immortalizes their memories. ”

“ But there is one 'domestic concern,' one 'party question,' which, while it is, in an obvious sense, a 'domestic concern,' does, in fact, necessarily and vitally involve those rights of Humanity for which this great man pleads, and which he is considered as representing when he urges upon us the claims of his oppressed country. ”

“ On this account alone, could a man of such rare power, of such wonderful eloquence, coming among us upon such a mission, fail. Yes, this favorite domestic institution, corrupting the whole administration of our government at home and abroad,—this it is that will disappoint and defeat the Hungarian patriot's idolised hope. ”