Tumult

“ The origin of the late tumult is to be traced not to rapacity or disaffection, feelings which have driven many armies into civil strife, much less to any shrinking from, or fear of danger. It was your excessive affection for me that roused you to act with more zeal than discretion. For even honourable motives of action, unless directed by judgment, are followed by disastrous results. ”

“ At last there comes the mixed multitude, following in no order, but not without shouting and tumult, men treading one another under foot, cowards looking back and refusing to march, old men dying without seeing their consolation. ”

“ For just as in a city, under an invasion of enemies when there has been siege and tumult, great is the uproar, so is it in the soul, under invasion of wine and luxury. “Who hath woe? who hath tumults? ”

“ The laying unreasonable burdens and restraints upon a people, will, if they are submitted to, debase their minds, break their spirits, enervate their courage, and sink them into cowards: if they are not submitted to, the consequence will be internal tumult, disorder, strife and contempt of government ”

“ And though those who were most fearful or least sleepy, women or men, noted that the lights above burned all night and that the tumult, albeit its note changed, held till dawn, they slept or kept vigil in security. ”

“ Mid their tumults and their tranquils,
As they stand in pomp and glory,
Firm and faithful in their own strength,
Till its frailty cometh on them
And they are completely conquered,—
Broken down in great destruction. ”

“ HAPPILY for us, the tumult begins to subside:—last night much was threatened, but nothing done—except in the early part of the evening, when about four-score or an hundred of the reformers got decently knocked on the head;—they were half killed by Mr. ”

“ The moment may come while we are alone in the darkness, under the stars, or while we walk by ourselves or in a crowd, or while we sit and muse. It may come upon the sinking ship or in the tumult of the battle. There is no saying when it may not come to us. ”

“ Streams of people apparently without end poured on and on, jostling each other in the crowd and hurrying forward, scarcely seeming to notice the riches that surrounded them on every side; while vehicles of all shapes and makes, mingled up together in one moving mass like running water, lent their ceaseless roar to swell the noise and tumult. ”

“ The door opened, Lincoln's voice was swept away and drowned, and a rush of people followed on the heels of the tumult. These intruders came towards him and Lincoln gesticulating. The voices without explained their soundless lips. "Show us the Sleeper, show us the Sleeper!" was the burden of the uproar. Men were bawling for "Order! Silence!"
Graham glanced towards the open doorway, and saw a tall, oblong picture of the hall beyond, a waving, incessant confusion of crowded, shouting faces, men and women together, waving pale blue garments, extended hands. ”

“ But, when we add to all this the extreme frequency of popular tumults; of plunder by troops, who own no control; of rebellion, and, its consequences, sieges, pillages, and precipitate flights; we shall not wonder if a prudent man never thinks his wealth safe until it is under ground. ”

“ Their next motion menaces, and scares both the two Houses and the City: which soon after acting over again that former part of Tumultuary motions, (never questioned, punished or repented) must now suffer for both; and see their former sin in the glasse of the present terrours and distractions.
No man is so blinde as not to see herein the hand of divine Justice; They that by Tumults first occasioned the raising of Armies, must now be chastned by their own Army for new Tumults. ”

“ The storm of conflict raged from dawn to late in the afternoon, with unabating fury. Men on both sides seemed immune to fatigue or fear, and for fourteen hours, as if endued with supernatural energy and power, struggled amidst dust, smoke, starvation and wounds and death with unflagging fury, in the maddening work of ruin and destruction. ”

“ How long is chaos and confusion to reign amongst men? How long will discord agitate the face of society? The winds of despair are, alas, blowing from every direction, and the strife that divideth and afflicteth the human race is daily increasing. ”

“ And it is equally clear that we experience every hour the effects of our fall and ruin. What, then, comes to us from all this chaos and wild confusion, in a voice of irresistible conviction, but the irrefragable truth of both those sides of humanity? ”

“ On the remaining one-eighth we pass a comfortless and precarious existence in disputed occupancy with countless ministers of death and pain—pass it in fighting for it, tooth and nail, a hopeless battle in which we are foredoomed to defeat. Everywhere death, terror, lamentation and the laughter that is more terrible than tears—the fury and despair of a race hanging on to life by the tips of its fingers! ”

“ Let intemperance rage, and young men go to ruin by dozens, and the very evil inspires the remedy; but when the trumpet has been sounded, and the battle set in array, and the victory only said and sung in speeches, and newspaper paragraphs, and temperance odes, and processions, then comes the return wave; people cry, Enough; the community, vastly satisfied, lies down to sleep in its laurels; and then comes the hour of danger.
But let not the man who has once been swept down the stream of intemperate excitement, almost to the verge of ruin, dream of any point of security for him. ”

“ FROM REVOLUTION In these doubtful and anxious days, when all the world is at unrest and, look which way you will, the road ahead seems darkened by shadows which portend dangers of many kinds, it is only common prudence that we should look about us and attempt to assess the causes of distress and the most likely means of removing them. ”

“ It may be that the fabric of our civilization will crumbling fall to unmeaning chaos and to formless dust, where oblivion broods and even memory forgets. Perhaps the blind Samson of some imprisoned force, released by thoughtless chance, may so wreck and strand the world that man, in stress and strain of want and fear, will shudderingly crawl back to savage and barbaric night. ”

“ You do not see the conflict coming, the cloud on the horizon: [208] the struggle begun in the sphere of the mind is going to descend to the arena of blood. Listen to the voice of God; woe to those who resist it! History shall not be theirs! ”

“ A valley of anarchy, — a confession that harmony of the elements was hopeless here, and that the toil of Nature for cycles working a world out of chaos, had failed, and achieved only a relapse into ruin, drearier than chaos. ”

“ But what possible motive Rebellion can have for weltering in her storm, what avenging crime may be, who its spirits may be, why they should be burst from their bonds, what their bonds may be, why they should battle with the time, what the time may be, and what a battle between the time and the spirits of avenging crime would resemble, we must confess ourselves quite unable to understand. ”

“ The misery of others, like a tempestuous night, added to the pleasures of your own security. You even enjoyed the storm, by contemplating the difference of conditions, and that which carried sorrow into the breasts of thousands served but to heighten in you a species of tranquil pride. ”

“ Cities and crowds, poverty, illness, pain and all the various terror of Civilization, robbed of the power to afflict, yet still hung hovering about the surface of his consciousness, though powerless to break his peace. ”

“ A strange and unprecedented contest it was, a battle that was a hundred thousand little battles, a battle in a sponge of ways and channels, fought out of sight of sky or sun under the electric glare, fought out in a vast confusion by multitudes untrained in arms, led chiefly by acclamation, multitudes dulled by mindless labour and enervated by the tradition of two hundred years of servile security against multitudes demoralised by lives of venial privilege and sensual indulgence. ”

“ Here let the insigniaed banner begin to be unfurled that shall yet extend its benign protecting wand to every kingdom upon the face of the earth; that while revolution treads on the heel of revolution—while commotion, anarchy and devastation push forward the reckless besom of destruction, and with continuous sweep are annihilating the last hopes of comfort in human life ”

“ But the strife went on with passing years,
Fed by resentment and pride and fears;
Nor priest nor people could yet define
The rightful range of the Boundary Line.
The strife went on with its loss and shame,
As generations went and came,
And each in its turn the task essayed
To solve the problem so long delayed.
* * * * *
Then kinder, kinglier thought prevailed,
Where threat of sword and gun had failed;
And love-illumined reason wrought
The adjustment long so vainly sought.
"For how can a trifle of earth and air
With the worth of human lives compare? ”

“ Down from the hills, broken into frightened masses, pallid, reeling with exhaustion, they swept onward like a whirlwind, bearing the protesting officers with them, or trampling them under foot; for human life was nothing to them in that hot, mad race. ”

“ There is a nameless unrest throughout the kingdom. I am like a hunter who crouches by his small fire amid the forest, and hears stealthy feet padding in the darkness, and almost sees the glimmer of burning eyes. ”

“ Taking the words in this sense, the meaning and fulfillment are still as apparent as before; and the expression joins its force to that of the remainder of the passage—“upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; [pg 057] the sea and the waves roaring; men's hearts failing them for fear and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth.” In this sense the expression in question would indicate commotion and violent disturbance in the social and political world. In this meaning all will at once see the vivid force of the text as applied to our times. ”

“ Bleeding in the feet, for example, so rarely practised in better times, is now among the fashionable follies of the day. That gentle, civilized system of evacuation, which prevailed under my auspices, is subverted by the reign of anarchy and emetics, of quackery and poison. In short, chaos is come again! Every one orders what seems good in his own eyes; there is no deference to the authority of ancient wisdom; our masters are laid upon the shelf, and their axioms not one tittle the more regarded for being delivered in languages as defunct as the subjects of their application. ”

“ All the social forces will then be thrown into spasmodic commotion; and, when those forces, in their native wildness, break through their traditional restraints, the world may have to witness a spectacle of revolutionary chaos without example in history. ”

“ For a weary instant I felt again the pressure of all those currents which bewilder, crush, and smother the struggling individual—movements of peoples, marching of armies, alliances of nations, the tides of poverty and disease, the tremendous impersonal economic conflicts. ”

“ A heavy, slow tread could be heard now and then, and now and then groans, and now and then words of protest and anger, bitter reproach, tremulous entreaty, fierce invective, and passionate lamentation. ”

“ The world has seen her great in adversity; struggling, without a thought of yielding, beneath accumulated difficulties, bravely, nay proudly, encountering distress, and rising in resolution as the storm increased. ”

“ But all seem to forget to restore order, for chaos is not man’s prerogative, and that in every history we read how such convulsion inevitably threw mankind back almost into elemental barbarism, glad even of the refuge of a tyranny against the more cruel dominion of their own passions. ”

“ But in the deeps the great impulses are maturing, the great forces are gathering. The hour comes that looses them. Then in an instant, it seems almost without warning, the quiet heart is in an insurrection, the people of ploughshares is become a people of swords. ”

“ Yells of triumph rose on the night air, but there was no firing or sounds of conflict, and resistance was plainly over. For a quarter of an hour they sat there, crushed with the immensity of the calamity. ”

“ And, behold, the third woe cometh quickly.—The third woe is the Reign of the Lord begun, with its attendant upsetting of the present order. The woes are visited upon those interested in maintaining the present order of things, who would like to retain indefinitely the advantages they have obtained. “The battle of this great Day of God Almighty will be the greatest revolution the world has ever seen. ”

“ They draw us pictures of the exhaustion which must inevitably follow upon such a struggle conducted upon the modern scale, of the stupendous loss of capital, destruction of credit, paralysis of industry, arrest of progress in things spiritual as well as temporal, the shock to civilisation, and the crippling for a generation, probably for several generations, possibly for ever, of the victorious country in its race with rivals who have wisely stood aside from the fray. ”

“ Meanwhile life went on with a smoothness strange and gratifying to those of us born into a period of strife and restlessness. No more wars, strikes, riots, agitation for higher wages or social experiments by wildeyed fanatics. ”

“ The struggle, which, when some great principle of politics or morals is the subject of the strife, ennobles in our eyes the unflinching combatants, only degrades when the violence and the rancour result from the soreness of wounded vanity, or the malice of blighted anticipation. ”

“ Ten years of unceasing turmoil, so laden with anguish, so fraught with incalculable consequences to the future of civilization, have brought the world to the verge of a calamity too awful to contemplate. ”

“ This craving gathers strength as the moments fly. The last hour for action is at hand. We tremble with the violence of the conflict within us,—of the definite with the indefinite—of the substance with the shadow. ”