Glorious Revolution

“ When we hear the word we feel a pleased sensation of a good, great, glorious time, intended by Providence to prepare the way for our various patriotic organizations. The Revolution? Why, yes, that was when our forefathers tied the first hard knot in the British lion’s tail! All the people were patriots, and all the patriots were as wise as college professors, and as brave as Albanians, and as great as a president. ”

“ For a very long time the Revolution appeared to be essentially a succession of glorious wars, which a people famished for liberty and carried away by the noblest passions had maintained against a coalition of all the powers of oppression and error. ”

“ Revolution he contemplated, of course; but the processes of revolution have always been the same, and to lead men into them there have always been required, first, a cause or presence to enlist adherents; second, an end, or something as a practical achievement. As a rule he fights well who has wrongs to redress; but vastly better fights he who, with wrongs as a spur, has also steadily before him a glorious result in prospect—a result in which he can discern balm for wounds, compensation for valor, remembrance and gratitude in the event of death. ”

“ We now arrive at the epoch when he developed the whole force of his genius, and acquired immortality, as the great leader of a revolution which, at its first outbreak, commanded the sympathy and respect of the world which looked on; beholding with gladness and hope the overthrow of feudal abuses, and the restoration of the oppressed majority of the French nation to the rights of men and citizens. ”

“ That they were to regenerate France; that the nation long enslaved, corrupted and degraded was to be emancipated, enlightened, and elevated by them, was his heartfelt belief. The material advantages of a great revolution to those who should effect it, he would not stop to consider. ”

“ The Revolution! Gentlemen, you attack the Revolution! What folly! The Revolution includes the whole nation, except those who exploit it; it is our country, fulfilling the sacred mission of freeing the people entrusted to it by Providence; it is the whole of France, doing its duty to the world! As for ourselves, we believe in our hearts that we have done our duty to France, and every time she has need of us, no matter what she, our revered mother, asks of us, we, her faithful sons, will obey her! ”

“ There was such fulness and activity of national life, such a wide diffusion of public spirit, such sympathy between the awakening energies of the people and the ablest and best of their leaders, as must have seemed most hopeful to those engaged in the work, and contrasts quite tragically with the gloomy close of the century, brought about by the influence of the French Revolution on English thought and feeling, and by the long and disastrous war to which it led. ”

“ He had been in his youth an enthusiast for liberty, and had hailed the dawn of the French Revolution as the promise of a day that was to banish war and slavery, and every form of vice and misery, from the face of the earth. ”

“ May the Almighty Ruler of the Universe, who has raised you to Independence, and given you a place among the nations of the earth, make the American Revolution an Era in the history of the world, remarkable for the progressive increase of human happiness! ”

“ Then came the Revolution, an event so great that I cannot hope to give the faintest, smallest image of it in this tiny frame. A world perished, and rose anew from its ashes, purified of many abuses, deprived of some valuable relics. ”

“ Excepting only, perhaps, military schools, none were good in France at this period; the thunders of the Revolution still roared over the land, the Revolutionists covered the earth with the blood of man, woman, and child. ”

“ But the great event in the history of the continent, which we are now met here to commemorate, that prodigy of modern times, at once the wonder and the blessing of the world, is the American Revolution. In a day of extraordinary prosperity and happiness, of high national honor, distinction, and power, we are brought together, in this place, by our love of country, by our admiration of exalted character, by our gratitude for signal services and patriotic devotion. ”

“ See, in France, all intellectual vigor dying under the tyranny of the Seventeenth Century to revive in splendor as Liberty awoke in the Eighteenth, and on the enfranchisement of French peasants in the Great Revolution, basing the wonderful strength that has in our time defied defeat. ”

“ Europe overturned, thrones tumbling one over the other, generations hurled into the common ditch with the steel in their breasts, the world labouring for half a century, and all this to bring forth the sham Legitimacy? One could conceive a great republic emerging from this social cataclysm: it would at least be fitted to inherit the conquests of the Revolution, that is, political liberty, liberty and publicity of thought, the levelling of ranks, the admission to all offices, the equality of all before the law, popular election and sovereignty. ”

“ What are we to think of that public joy, and public sycophancy, after so many years of hard fighting for civil and religious liberty? For what were the battles of Naseby and Worcester? For what the Solemn League and Covenant? For what the trial and execution of Charles I.? For what the elevation of Cromwell? Alas! for what were all the experiments and sufferings of twenty years, the breaking up of old and mighty customs, and twenty years of blood, usurpation, and change? What were the benefits of the Revolution? ”

“ "THE times that tried men's souls,"* are over- and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished. ”

“ The French Revolution following so soon upon the great American Revolution, shouldered the people's cause ahead more than a thousand years, and was worth every drop of blood spilled in the triumphal march of freedom! ”

“ We see servility and manliness, human nature at its best and at its worst, now touching the clouds, now grovelling in the mire. For individuals as for nations the Revolution was an ordeal drawing out the brightest and the darkest sides of human character. ”

“ If I have occasionally given vent to my indignation in glancing at the excesses of the revolution, I have not withheld my tribute of applause from those institutions, which, being calculated to benefit mankind by the gratuitous diffusion of knowledge, would reflect honour on any nation. ”

“ The men who proposed this surrender of their rights, who had already, by joining the Tiers, done so much to accomplish the great social revolution, deserve greater consideration as a class than history has, as a rule, meted out to them. ”

“ But, above all, the events of the French revolution have produced the deepest solicitude as well as the highest admiration. To call your nation brave were to pronounce but common praise. Wonderful people! ages to come will read with astonishment the history of your brilliant exploits, I rejoice that the period of your toils and of your immense sacrifices is approaching. I rejoice that the interesting revolutionary movements of so many years have issued in the formation of a constitution designed to give permanency to the great object for which you have contended. ”

“ The English revolution of the seventeenth century, while it humbled the false and oppressive aristocracy of rank and title, was prodigal in the development of the real nobility of the mind and heart. Its history is bright with the footprints of men whose very names still stir the hearts of freemen, the world over, like a trumpet peal. ”

“ This revolution has been brought on and carried out by the wealth of the few who had the means to sustain it, and they in return receive the honors and distinctions usually bestowed on the successful leaders of a revolution. The many look up to them with reverence, and stand back and give place to them whenever they appear. ”

“ Vive la Revolution! The most heroic word in all languages is REVOLUTION.
It thrills and vibrates; cheers and inspires. Tyrants and time-servers fear it, but the oppressed hail it with joy.
The throne trembles when this throbbing word is lisped, but to the hovel it is food for the famishing and hope for the victims of despair.
Let us glorify today the revolutions of the past and hail the Greater Revolution yet to come before Emancipation shall make all the days of the year May Days of peace and plenty for the sons and daughters of toil. ”

“ We grieved to behold the beautiful and brilliant star of the French Revolution sink at last into mid-ocean, the mere meteor of military glory.—Feeling all the disappointment of its friends, we cannot but contrast it with the deep repose, which our own illustrious and honored patriots enjoy, in the land which gave them birth, beneath the mighty shadows of our happy political revolution. ”

“ It is a more agreeable anticipation to every humane mind to contemplate the glory, the happiness, the freedom, and peace which may for ages to come pervade this new-born nation, emancipated by the uncommon vigor, valor, fortitude, and patriotism of her soldiers and statesmen. ”

“ I contend every where, that they must be a great body, for the protection of the King’s crown and his people. The work of the Revolution, which has been building up these seven-and-fifty years, must not be risked upon an even chance. ”

“ In spite of the extravagant direction given to this enthusiasm, in spite of the crimes and follies in which it lost itself, the French Revolution derives from the force, truth, and universality of the ideas which it took for its law, and from the passion with which it could inspire a multitude for these ideas, a unique and still living power ”

“ There are, then, in the story of the Revolution these two phases, so distinct that their recognition is the foundation of all just views upon the period. In the first, the leaders of the nation are bent upon practical reforms; the monarchy is a machine to hand for their accomplishment; the sketch of a new France is drawn, the outlines even begin to be filled by trained and masterly hands. ”

“ The French Revolution, with its dramatic overthrow of tyranny and its splendid watchword, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ made its own appeal to the hope as well as the imagination of the English people, although the sanguinary incidents which marked it retarded the movement for Reform in England, and as a matter of fact sent the Reformers into the wilderness for the space of forty years. ”

“ Indeed, he remarked, to judge by appearances, one might imagine that the Revolution had destroyed nothing, but that, on the contrary, it had endeavoured to foster and encourage titles and aristocracy, so rapidly had they increased of late years. ”

“ It was here that I proposed, for the first time, and in an affirmative manner, to carry out the Revolution from below, by making an appeal to the reason and to the interest of each citizen, and by demanding of power only the notoriety and the impulse which it alone, today, is capable of giving to an idea. ”

“ He had adopted the Revolution from a belief that the great mass of the people would be better off in the world without kings, nobility, or aristocrats; and having made himself firm in this belief, he used to the utmost his coarse, huge, burly power in upsetting these encumbrances on the nation. ”

“ If we speak of the wars of the Revolution in which we fought for our independence and the protection of the indefeasible rights of man, it is because we are proud of our fervent ardour and enthusiasm. ”

“ At the commencement of the revolution,—upon every greater or lesser demonstration of popular feeling,—the first cry, to the rich or the supposed rich, was to illuminate their houses in honour of the sovereign people, or rather of those who assumed the rank and title of sovereignty wholly to themselves. ”

“ More than any thing else do they illustrate that which can be properly called the History of our Revolution—and in so doing how vastly important do they appear to the entire cause of civil liberty? As the worthies of those great days are sinking, one by one, from among us, the value of what is known about them, and especially of what may be known through their memories, is increasing in a rapidly augmenting ratio. ”

“ In the present work, for the first time in a systematic and complete way, is set forth the inward history of our Revolution,—the history of its ideas, its spiritual moods, its passions, as these uttered themselves at the time in the writings of the two parties of Americans who either promoted or resisted that great movement. ”

“ Such has been the incredible rapidity with which the revolutions in France have succeeded each other, that I believe the names of those who have successively exercised absolute power, under the pretence of liberty, are to be numbered by the years of the revolution ”

“ The causes and significance of your patriotic, national, humanitarian, honest, serious and true revolution, capable of long struggle, cannot be explained but in terms of the sublimity and profoundness of its objectives. Thus, amidst humanity, the Revolution has aggrandized in depth and width. ”

“ “But every time there have been conquests there have been conquerors; every time there has been a revolution in any state there have been great men,” says history. ”

“ Notwithstanding its excesses and follies, the great French Revolution will ever have an absorbing interest for mankind, because it began as a struggle for the advancement of the cause of manhood, liberty, and equal rights. ”

“ The Revolution, in abolishing royalty, nobility and clergy, has already chastised the crimes of the enemies of the people: The evil your race has done to ours is expiated. Count of Plouernel, the conquered have taken their revenge upon the conquerors, the nation has re-entered upon her sovereignty. ”

“ Any country could have a Revolution—every country had had one. A Restoration was merely what a revolution involved, and the Empire had been for the French but a revolutionary incident, in addition to being by good luck for the novelist an immensely pictorial one. ”

“ On the old continent, revolution has followed revolution, dynasty dynasty, reform reform, while we have become firmer, more united, less liable to decay, notwithstanding the rapid multiplication of our numbers. At least, the blessings of social peace, plentiful food, free exercise of conscience, are ours to a degree that mankind have never before known. ”