Pederasty

“ So that in such a state riches will necessarily be in general esteem, particularly if the men are governed by their wives, which has been the case with many a brave and warlike people except the Celts, and those other nations, if there are any such, who openly practise pederasty. ”

“ A sentence of death and infamy was often founded on the slight and suspicious evidence of a child or a servant; the guilt of the green faction, of the rich, and of the enemies of Theodora was presumed by the judges, and pederasty became the crime of those to whom no crime could be imputed. ”

“ The latter work is a revelation of the pederasty with which the best Roman society was honeycombed. I believe conditions are about the same to-day in all civilizations above the barbarous, although in Christian nations one has not been permitted to publish the facts. They are really not horrible, nor portentous of ruin for society ”

“ Vice is curbed under the heroic discipline imposed by the Revolution. Its allies dare not attack the forces of virtue in broad daylight; they hide under masks of piety and mercy, in order to influence public opinion, and deflect it in favor of rogues, inciting them against the true patriots. But I will tear their masks from their faces, and force the Assembly to see what is beneath: the hideous face of treason. ”

“ And in fighting with this serpent was it that I lost my eye. And the Black Oppressor am I called. And for this reason I am called the Black Oppressor, that there is not a single man around me whom I have not oppressed, and justice have I done unto none.” “Tell me,” said Peredur, “how far is it hence?” “The same day that thou settest forth, thou wilt come to the Palace of the Sons of the King of the Tortures.” “Wherefore are they called thus?” “The Addanc of the Lake slays them once every day. When thou goest thence, thou wilt come to the Court of the Countess of the Achievements.” ”

“ Possibly, here and there an extremist might be found to object, that, thus openly to set up, as he did, his own prejudices and those of his family, in the place of law, justice and humanity, as his rule of official conduct, to the manifest injury of twenty-seven thousands of innocent people, was a most shameless abuse of power and perversion of authority. ”

“ Charvát.—However, as a punishment for the spilling of blood and for incendiarism, I announce in the name of the district government: From each insurrectionist estate and land-holding, one mature man must be enrolled in the army. The plotters of the rebellion will, it is true, have their life, estate and liberty assured them, but as a fine and as a humiliation as well and a punishment for their crime they shall be publicly flogged here in the presence of their lords and of their people whom they stirred up to rebel. ”

“ To keep slavery out of sight, yet in existence, unjustified, unexcused, unrepented of, a contradiction in the national consciousness, a political and deadly sin, the sin against the Holy Spirit of American Liberty, known but not confessed, the public secret of the people—that would lead to suppressing petitions, suppressing debate in Congress and out of Congress, to silencing the pulpit, the press, and the people. ”

“ The knightly virtues range before us as distinctly as the monastic; and harsh is the contrast between the character they outline and the feudal actuality of cruelty and greed and lust. Feudalism itself presents everywhere a state of contrast between its principles of mutual fidelity and protection, and its actuality of oppression, revolt, and private war. ”

“ Every one fears that his confederate may prove a traitor, and if [Pg 243] one is heard openly cursing the Government as oppressive and intolerable in a café or other public resort, though the sentiment is heartily responded to, the utterer is suspected and avoided as a Police stool-pigeon and spy. ”

“ You whose courage the enemies of the Constitution insolently flatter themselves that they have shaken; you whose consciences they try each day, to alarm by styling the love of liberty as the spirit of faction — as if you could have forgotten that a despotic court also gave the name of factionists to the representatives of the people who went to take the oath of the Tennis-Court [2] ”

“ The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissention, which, in different ages and countries, has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. ”

“ I am not placing such an insult upon you, my daughter ... but after all, the rebellion of that female vassal is as novel as it is monstrous. Oh, the spirit of revolt among the populace, although partly broken to-day, has spread into our domains and has infested our peasants also; and that is taken by the crown for a pretext to add to our troubles by encroaching upon our rights, claiming that they must be first sanctioned by the jurists. ”

“ To attack the state immediately is to be guilty either of rebellion or high treason. Rebellion is to attempt to raise, or actually to raise, a power in hostility to the power of the state, and to resist therewith that power of the state. ”

“ The mob seemed to have imagined that the King and nobility had some strange dreadful power, and that unless they were all annihilated they would rise up and trample all down before them, and those who had the direction of affairs profited by this delusion to multiply executioners, and clear away all that they supposed to stand in the way of the renewal of the nation. ”

“ The sons of these men, eighty years later, showed at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, that when Law and Peace become but grotesque masks, under which are hidden the faces of legalized injustice and tyranny, then the time has come for armed revolt and organized resistance. ”

“ The Assembly taught the people to regard rank as something wrong; and the people, taking up the idea, and colouring it with their own fears and ancient hatreds, soon came to look on all possessors of rank as evil-doers, who had no right to fair treatment or protection from the law, and for whom the proper destiny was the guillotine. ”

“ If your nobility is tainted by union with us, could you not have kept it pure by private regulations, by not seeking brides from the plebs, and not suffering your sisters or daughters to marry outside your order? No plebeian will offer violence to a patrician maiden, it is the patricians who indulge in those criminal practices. ”

“ As we once had a rebellion of the clowns, we have now an opposition of the pedlers. The quiet of the nation has been, for years, disturbed by a faction, against which all factions ought to conspire; for its original principle is the desire of leveling; it is only animated, under the name of zeal, by the natural malignity of the mean against the great. ”

“ The country people, ground by a long course of exaction, oppression, and insult, treated more as beasts than men by their feudal lords, now seized the moment, when the Government was beset with difficulties and enemies, to take a blind, sweeping, and tremendous vengeance. The nobility and the petty gentry holding fiefs under them had all been accustomed to plunder, tread on, and abuse the peasantry as a race of inferior creatures. ”

“ But when a Mob of Chairmen or Servants, or a Gang of Thieves and Sharpers, are almost too big for the Civil Authority to suppress, what must be the Case in a seditious Tumult, or general Riot of the People? ”

“ Thus it is that such courts, being continually in a conspiracy against the property and felicity of their people, and preying continually upon them by vile means and pretences, teach their people to conspire against honesty, and to prey upon one another; nay, by robbing them, they make it necessary for them to rob. Thus readily, necessarily, and naturally, is the spirit of the governors transfused into the governed, who are ever taught civil corruption by their superiors, before they practise it themselves. ”

“ Mine has been in endeavoring to screen every man, in every class, from oppression, and particularly in defending the high and eminent, who, in the bad times of confiscating princes, confiscating chief-governors, or confiscating demagogues, are the most exposed to jealousy, avarice, and envy. ”

“ It is an age of incredible scandal, of mob law, of coups d'état and proscriptions, saved only from utter gloom by the illusory light shed from the figures of a few great men and by the never absent sense of freedom and expansion. ”

“ And now, as wickeder things advance more fruitfully, and abandoned manners creep on day by day, those abominable shrines of an impious assembly are maturing themselves throughout the whole world. Assuredly this confederacy ought to be rooted out and execrated. ”

“ I do not know, indeed, whence so barbarous a custom has crept into the State: for, whilst the name of a traitor is not only hateful and hated, but also burns in the stain of everlasting dishonour upon a whole posterity; yet men who determine upon breaking their faith, and opposing their kings or states, may reject the favours they have received by formal letters, may abjure their fealty, and despoil themselves of the rights and duties of the State ”

“ There is, in the meantime, no doubt that, however wild, ferocious, and savage they may have appeared, the strong and terrible hand of injustice and oppression had much, too much, to do with the crimes which they had committed, and which drove them out of the pale of civilized life. ”

“ Surely if the United States Government does not confiscate the property of those who are called rebels, the M. E. Church, in her highest legislative assembly, will hardly set a precedent by claiming the property of their Southern brethren.
“But it may, perhaps, be said that we have been sinners, rebels, traitors, touching our civil and political relations to the Government. ”

“ Personal hatred, jealousy, and private revenge produce political revolutions, drenching the city with the blood of its children. These revolutions endure for months, perhaps even for years, and end with arbitrary decrees, which are violated or undone the moment they have received magisterial sanction. ”

“ These are the grievances of the man in the street, and they appear grave enough—when once one has invested oneself with the right of censorship. Then the rebels—wretched, unsuccessful farmers, who found themselves misled and their ideas of duty confounded—these were the chief objects of the lust for revenge. ”

“ Left, then, to their own devices, unchecked by any stronger arm, inflamed by a multitude of personal wrongs, habituated to the shedding of human blood, contemptuous of State laws that did not reach them, enraged by Federal acts that impugned, as they thought, an inalienable right of man, it was inevitable that this fiery and vindictive race should fall speedily into warring among themselves. ”

“ But since we cannot in our hearts find one single spot of rebellion or treason, or that we have in any manner aimed at subverting the settled government or attempting of the person of any either magistrate or private man, notwithstanding the several reproaches and threats of some who for sinister ends were disaffected to us and censured our innocent and honest designs, and since all people in all places where we have yet been can attest our civil, quiet, peaceable behaviour, far different from that of rebellion [rebellious?] ”

“ What grounds for alarm and terrible apprehension when in a confederacy of such vast extent, so many rival commercial cities, so much sectional jealousy, such violent political parties, such fierce contests for power, there should be but one moneyed tribunal before which all the rival and contending elements must appear. ”

“ But they found in the peasant a sleepless suspicion, a silent energy and cunning, which thwarted all their efforts, and which, if they persisted, would often turn to violence, maintaining the rights of the people by the horrors of a Jacquerie. The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed more than one peasants’ revolt. And if some plot of the reactionaries should one day place again upon the throne of France a son of the House of Orleans, or a Bonaparte Pretender, be sure the croquants of the South, the Jacques of the North, would defend their liberties again as violently to-morrow. ”

“ The downfall of a dynasty is sure to evoke severe recrimination against the late ruler; and now my parent, who but a few days past could have tilted the beam of justice at his mere pleasure, was overwhelmed with not merely abuse and attack, but several weighty accusations of crime were alleged against him. ”

“ The peasantry, ever oppressed by those in authority, were, of course, most faithful to the interests of this famous outlaw, to whose open hand they often came for bread, and who was ever ready to aid them. Thus, no bribery nor offered rewards could induce one of these rough but true-hearted mountaineers to betray Petard, or disclose the secret paths that led to his lofty stronghold.
"Cunning beyond what usually falls to the lot of roguery," continued Carlton, "Petard delighted in outwitting his enemies of the law, and in leading those whom he desired to fleece into his net. ”

“ If Your Majesty and the King wish well to the nation—I am sorry to say it—its happiness depends on your quitting immediately the scenes of riot and placing yourselves in a situation to treat with the National Assembly on equal terms, whereby the King may be unbiassed and unfettered by a compulsive, overbearing mob ”

“ That any combination of men assuming to act in the place of such State, and attempting to ensnare or coerce its inhabitants into a confederation hostile to the Union, is rebellious, treasonable, and destitute of all moral authority ”

“ Such is the eternal doom of disordered states. The mediator between rank and rank,—the kindly noble—the dispassionate patriot—the first to act—the most hailed in action—darkly vanishes from the scene. Fiercer and more unscrupulous spirits alone stalk the field; and no neutral and harmonizing link remains between hate and hate,—until exhaustion, sick with horrors, succeeds to frenzy, and despotism is welcomed as repose!
Chapter 5.IV. The Hollowness of the Base.
The rapid and busy march of state events has led us long away from the sister of the Tribune and the betrothed of Adrian. ”