Political Pamphlets eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 266 pages of information about Political Pamphlets.

Political Pamphlets eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 266 pages of information about Political Pamphlets.
intolerable.  It had contracted a great debt to carry on its wars.  In order to be able to pay the interest of this debt, and to support an enormous standing army in time of peace, it laid upon the people burdens which they could no longer endure.  It fined and flogged fathers and mothers if their children were detected in smuggling.  Its courts of justice were filled with cruel and base judges.  The nobility treated the common people like dogs; these latter were compelled to serve as soldiers, but were excluded from all share, or chance of honour and command, which were engrossed by the nobility.

Now, when the time came for the people to have the power in their hands, was it surprising that the first use they made of it was to take vengeance on their oppressors?  I will not answer this question myself.  It shall be answered by Mr. Arthur Young, the present Secretary of the Board of Agriculture.  He was in France at the time, and living upon the very spot, and having examined into the causes of the Revolution, he wrote and published the following remarks, in his Travels, vol. i. page 603:—­

’It is impossible to justify the excesses of the people on their taking up arms; they were certainly guilty of cruelties; it is idle to deny the facts, for they have been proved too clearly to admit of doubt.  But is it really the people to whom we are to impute the whole?  Or to their oppressors, who had kept them so long in a state of bondage?  He who chooses to be served by slaves and by ill-treated slaves, must know that he holds both his property and his life by a tenure far different from those who prefer the service of well-treated freemen; and he who dines to the music of groaning sufferers, must not, in the moment of insurrection, complain that his sons’ throats are cut.  When such evils happen, they surely are more imputable to the tyranny of the master than to the cruelty of the servant.  The analogy holds with the French peasants.  The murder of a seigneur, or a country seat in flames, is recorded in every newspaper; the rank of the person who suffers attracts notice; but where do we find the registers of that seigneur’s oppressions of his peasantry, and his exactions of feudal services from those whose children were dying around them for want of bread?  Where do we find the minutes that assigned these starving wretches to some vile pettifogger, to be fleeced by impositions, and mockery of justice, in the seigneural courts?  Who gives us the awards of the Intendant and his sub-delegues, which took off the taxes of a man of fashion, and laid them with accumulated weight on the poor, who were so unfortunate as to be his neighbours?  Who has dwelt sufficiently upon explaining all the ramifications of despotism, regal, aristocratical, and ecclesiastical, pervading the whole mass of the people; reaching, like a circulating fluid, the most distant capillary tubes of poverty and wretchedness?  In these cases the sufferers are
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Political Pamphlets from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.