Part 13

The Roman Senate, in high conclave assembled, deliberated respecting the raising of fresh levies of men and arms. Powerful and vindictive foes, with difficulty held at bay, were gathering for attack, while the commons were ripe for revolt. Meanwhile, a turbulent crowd thronged the forum, surging to and fro like forests tossed by conflicting winds. Exasperated by oppression, beggared by usury, they recounted their causes of discontent, and thus fanned the smouldering flame in each other’s breast. It was from their households the conscription now pending was to be made; their blood was to stain the fields of battle, and victory, bringing but empty honors, would leave them more under the power of their masters than before. To increase the confusion, some Latin horsemen came full speed to the city, announcing that the Volsci were on their march to attack it; upon which the people set up a shout of joy, willing to perish if so be their oppressors might perish with them.

Cries of agony now arose above the tumult, and an old man pursued by creditors ran into the midst imploring aid; but his pursuers catching hold of the chain which was fastened to his right foot, he fell upon his face, while the blood gushed from his nostrils. He had just escaped from the dungeon of a creditor; his clothes were in tatters; his body emaciated by hunger; while his face, hideous with matted hair and beard, resembled more that of a beast than of a man. Some soldiers at length recalled the face of a centurion under whom they had served, famed for military skill, and distinguished by honors received as the reward of valor in the field. It needed but this spark to ignite a train already prepared for explosion. With a roar, like that of surges upon a winter’s beach, they trampled his pursuers beneath their feet, bidding him without fear to tell his tale, for they would protect him though it were necessary to fling both senate and consuls into the Tiber. And now to that fearful uproar succeeded a silence like that of the sepulchre, permitting the feeble tones of the miserable man to reach every ear and touch every heart in that vast assembly, as thus he spake:--

“Ten years ago, my countrymen, I was the owner of a little farm, the fruit of my labor and that of my ancestors. It lay along the base of hills around whose roots wound a brook which, watering my fields, ran into the Tiber; on its banks grew the elms that sustained our vines; the hills were clothed with chestnut and olives, and there also was the pasture of my flocks. In the sheltered vale beneath, the almond mingled with the fig, the flax spread its azure flowers to the sun, apples bent the laden boughs, and grain rewarded the toil of the reaper. How dear to me was that humble cot with its straw-thatched roof from which the swallows sprang to greet the breaking day; where the stock-dove hung its nest in the beechen shade, and morning breezes brought perfume to its threshold. How sweet, when the weary bullocks were released from the yoke, to lie among the lengthening shadows and listen to the dying breeze steal through the soft acanthus leaves in wild, low music. Our wants were few and easily satisfied; my wife ground the corn, her hands spun and wove our clothing, my children were dutiful; we led a frugal, happy life, revering the immortal gods and cherishing the virtues of our fathers. These few acres, valued as the fruit of my own labor, the gift of my ancestors, consecrated by their toil and pregnant with their ashes, were to me inexpressibly dear. I, indeed, was most of the time in arms for my country, yet often in the midnight watches of the camp did memory picture those sunny fields, my family thinking and talking of the absent soldier; nor did I forget to thank the immortal gods, that, should my country require my life, my family possessed a heritage and a home. The sun was declining as I neared my native vale on my return from the Sabine war. Eagerly I pressed to the brow of the hill that I might look down upon that dear cot. It was a heap of ashes; the storm of war had swept over those pleasant fields; fire had consumed the standing corn; the cattle were driven off, and the beauty of the groves had departed. As nearer I drew, I descried the body of my wife and first-born lying dead at the threshold; the rest had fled, not a living thing, even a dog, was left to welcome me; and the tired soldier had not where to lay his head.

“To war succeeded famine, hostilities continued, taxes increased, the land lay untilled. I was compelled to borrow money at exorbitant usury; that loved heritage passed into the hands of strangers. The golden crown and silver chain, bestowed for being the first to enter the enemy’s camp, went next; they are in the coffers of a man who never saw the color of a foeman’s eye nor drew his sword in the State’s behalf. All this not sufficing, my creditor immured me in a foul dungeon beneath his palace; with fifteen pounds of iron, the utmost the law permits, was I loaded; a pound of corn and water was my daily food, and I, a Roman citizen and a centurion, was scourged like a dog. Had I not broken my chain and flung myself upon you for protection, this war-worn body would have been cut in pieces and apportioned among my creditors.

“Comrades on many a bloody field, behold this arm,--which in twenty-eight battles has fought for the liberty of Rome till the hand clave to the sword hilt,--worn by cruel fetters to the bone; this body, seamed with honorable scars, dripping blood from the knotted scourge. Milder tortures would have been reserved for me had I been the betrayer instead of the defender of my country. The laws which consume the poor man’s substance and drain his blood are by usurers enacted, by them are executed. Usurers rob the public chest and parcel out the conquered lands among themselves. Let us, rather than longer submit to such extortion, fling wide the gates to the approaching enemy, leave them to exercise their wisdom in making laws where there are none to govern, levying taxes where there are none to pay, and displaying their valor where there is nought to defend. By the ashes of that ruined home, those loved forms mangled by the Sabine sword and devoured by the vultures of the Apennines, by the sufferings of my remaining children whose young lives are consumed by the tortures from which I have fled, by him who on Olympus holds his awful seat and shakes the nations with his nod, I conjure you to assert the rights of the people and the ancient liberties of Rome.”

VIRGINIUS TO THE ROMAN ARMY

The night wind blew in fitful gusts, with occasional dashes of rain, where, grouped around their watch-fires, and sheltered by the dense foliage of a beechen grove, a Roman cohort held its leaguer. Some, their spears thrust into the ground beside them, sat upright against the trees; while others lay at full length, with their heads resting upon their shields.

As the flames threw their red light upon the war-scarred faces of the veterans, they revealed only sullen features. No song nor jest was heard,--no sound, save the low hiss of the raindrops on the embers, the bay of a wolf in the distant forest, and the low muttered words of a soldier who was telling to his comrade how that, the night before, as the sun fell over the hills, a centurion rode past his beat full speed to Rome, summoned there by some new outrage of the Patricians.

All that night, throughout the host, mysterious forebodings crept. Men around their watch-fires spake in low whispers; and many a silent grasp of the hand passed from man to man. As the night wore away, and the day dawned, Virginius, upon a foaming steed, his head bare, and in his right hand a bloody knife, dashed past the guard to where--beneath an oak which, withered and scorched by sacrificial fires, flung no shadow--great Jove was worshipped.

Mounting the altar-steps, he turned, and, with bloodshot eyes, glared upon the soldiers who thronged tumultuously around him. Holding aloft the bloody knife, he exclaimed, “With this weapon I have slain my only child, to preserve her from dishonor!” Yells of horror and bitter execrations rose from the whole army; and a thousand swords flashed in the sun’s bright beams.

“Soldiers!” he cried, “I am like this blasted tree. Two years ago the Ides of May three lusty sons went with me to the field. In one disastrous fight they perished. A daughter, beautiful as the day, yet remained; ’tis but a week ago you saw her here, bearing to her old sire home comforts prepared by her own hands, and sharing with him the evening meal, and you blessed her as you passed.

“You’ll never see her more, who weekly came, with the soft music of her voice, and spells of home, to cheer our hearts. As on her way to school she crossed the Forum, Appius Claudius, through his minion Marcus, claimed her as a slave. With desperate haste I rode to Rome. Holding my daughter by the hand, and by my side her uncle, her aged grandsire, and Icilius her betrothed, I claimed my child.

“The judge, that he may gain his end, decides that in his house and custody she must remain, till I, by legal process, prove my right! The guards approach. Trembling, she clings around my neck,--her hot tears on my cheek. Snatching this knife from a butcher’s stall, I plunged it in her breast, that her pure soul might go free and unstained to her mother and her ancestors.

“And this is the reward a grateful country gives her soldiery! Cursed be the day my mother bore me! Accursed my sire’s untimely joy! Accursed the twilight hour, when ’mid Etruscan groves I wooed and won Acestes’ beauteous child, while youth’s bright dreams were busy at my heart!

“Soldiers! the deadliest foes of our liberties are behind, not before us; they are not the Æqui, the Volsci, and the Sabines, who meet us in fair fight; but that pampered aristocracy, who chain you by the death-penalty to the camp, that in your absence they may work their will upon those you leave behind.

“But why do I seek to kindle a fire in ice? Why seek to arouse the vengeance of those who care for no miseries but their own, and are enamoured of their fetters? I, indeed, can lose no more. Misfortune hath emptied her quiver,--she hath no other shaft for this bleeding breast; but flatter not yourselves that the lust of Appius Claudius has expired with the defeat of his purpose.

“Your homes, likewise, invite the destroyer; into your fold the grim wolf will leap; among the lambs of your flock will he revel, his jaws dripping blood. For you, also, the bow is bent; the arrow drawn to the head; and the string impatient of its charge. By all that I have lost, and that you imperil by delay, avenge this accursed wrong!

“If you have arms, use them; liberties, vindicate them; patriotism, save the tottering State; natural affection, protect the domestic hearth; piety, appease the wrath of the gods by avenging the blood that cries to heaven. To arms! To arms! or your swords will leap from their scabbards, the trumpets sound the onset, and the standards of _themselves_ advance to rebuke your delay!”

GENERAL GAGE AND THE BOSTON BOYS

The year seventeen hundred and seventy-five dawned gloomily upon the inhabitants of Massachusetts Bay. Portentous clouds darkened the political horizon, while clear-sighted and forecasting men prepared themselves for a struggle they saw to be inevitable. The attempt to crush by force of arms the spirit of liberty in the colonies had already commenced. A hostile fleet, with guns double-shotted and trained upon the town, lay at anchor in Boston Harbor. The town was under martial law, the hills bristled with cannon, sentinels challenged the citizen going to his daily vocations, and the common was a camp.

On the wharves of this busy emporium of colonial trade that had been wont to send its thousand vessels each year to foreign and domestic ports, the sailor’s song was hushed, warehouses were closed, and no canvas fluttered to the breeze. But few shops, and those only which dealt in the necessaries of life, were opened, and the hammer of the artisan lay rusting on the anvil. In many streets the snow lying white and undisturbed before the doors of hospitable dwellings evinced that their occupants had fled from a tyranny they were unable to resist. Beneath this grinding oppression, so intolerable to the spirit of a free people, no weak complaints were uttered nor sounds of riot heard. The citizen pursuing his business brushed the sentinel with a calm brow and sealed lips, and the children went to and fro to their schools and plays.

When soldiers barracked and horses were stabled in their churches, when bayonets gleamed in their halls of legislation, they lifted up the voice to God in other places and the town meeting was held as heretofore. For the first time in the history of peoples, the flocks sported in the pasture or slept in the fold unconscious of the butcher’s knife; the inhabitants of Massachusetts had resolved to eat no mutton, that their resources might be increased. On the roofs of sheds and porticoes wool and flax were bleaching; from hundreds of dwellings were heard the hum of the wheel and the stroke of the loom, where the mothers of heroes were preparing their children for the forum or the field. Balls were run and cartridges made by the hands of women and children at the kitchen fire, and, deftly concealed in loads of offal, passed unchallenged the sentries to hiding-places in the neighboring towns. Men who pursued their usual labors during the day met at midnight in garrets and cellars, and after swearing upon the Scriptures to keep secret the purpose of the meeting, consulted and prayed together, enduring meanwhile as best they might the insults of the soldiery.

It was Wednesday afternoon and half-holiday. General Gage, commander of troops that held watch and ward over the rebels in Massachusetts Bay and the town of Boston in particular, was sitting in his quarters at the Province House. The general’s brow was clouded and he was evidently a prey to uneasy thoughts; the intelligent perversity of his opponents both perplexed and alarmed him. He liked not the unwonted calm, the utter absence of bluster and bravado, for he knew too well the temper of the people with whom he had to deal to mistake silence for submission. He had fought with Washington at Duquesne, aided to bear the dying Braddock from the field, and feared that the rifles that then saved the British army from utter destruction were only biding their time, and the drums that beat at Louisburg might at any moment wake the slumbering fires and the mine explode beneath his feet.

While thus uneasily balancing probabilities, his servant announced that some boys requested an interview. The general, who was exceedingly fond of children, ordered them to be admitted.

“Well, boys,” he inquired, “what is your business with me?”

“We have come, sir,” said the tallest boy, “to demand satisfaction.”

“What, have your fathers been teaching you rebellion and sent you to show it here?”

“No, sir, nobody sent us and nobody told us to come, but we’ve come of our own accord for our rights. The common belongs to the people of Boston and their children. We are town born, all of us, and so are the boys whom we represent, therefore we have a right to play on the common. We have asked many old people, and they tell us that boys always have had this right, that they played there and their fathers before them. We have never made faces at your soldiers, called them lobsters, thrown snowballs at them, or insulted them in any manner, but while we were minding our business, skating and building snow hills, just as we have always done every winter before even they were here, they came and trampled down our sliding hills, and broke the ice on our skating ground with the breech of their musket. We complained; they called us young rebels and told us to help ourselves if we could. We then went to the captain, and he laughed at us. We have come, sir, for our rights. We want only the rights which the law gives us and boys have always had. Yesterday your soldiers destroyed our works for the third time, and we won’t endure this oppression any longer. Your soldiers may shoot us if they wish, but if you will not give us satisfaction, we will get together all the boys and defend our works while there is a snowball, a stone, or a boy left in the town of Boston; for if we can’t play on our own common and skate on our own pond, what can we do?”

The general could not but admire the resolution of the boys and assured them that henceforth their rights should be respected.

THE WRECKED PIRATE

In the year 1813 a piratical schooner was wrecked upon one of the desolate Keys of the Bahamas. The captain alone, of a crew of ninety men, reached shore upon a broken spar. For several months he subsisted upon shell-fish and tropical fruits, with which the island abounded, eked out by some provisions saved from the wreck.

While in this solitude, feelings which had long slumbered were awakened in his breast, and his heart was melted to repentance.

After long months of waiting, he was rescued by a passing vessel bound for Spain. A pardon was at length obtained for him from the Spanish government, and he ever after lived a Christian life. But what thus wrought upon the heart of the savage, hardened in crime and blood? “Fear,” I hear you exclaim, “heightened by that terrible solitude; death groans and piteous entreaties for mercy that haunted each lonely ravine, and moaned in the winds of midnight!” Oh, no; it was but the evening song of the turtle-doves which built their nests among the mangrove bushes that fringed the borders of the creeks.

Behold him as he stands! that man of brawl and battle, his stern features unmoved as the cliffs beside him, gazing upon the bodies of the companions of many a bloody fray, tossed amid the fragments of broken timbers in the surf at his feet. What a mingling of the elements of agony and fear!--the abyss of ocean, the lonely wreck, the livid bodies of the dead, the desolate shore, himself cut off from all human fellowship, a stinging conscience within, and the eternal God above him, whose lightnings play around his head. All these move him not. But hark! As those bird-notes, so sweetly mournful, strike upon his ear, familiar through many an hour of careless boyhood in his early home, the blood flushes to his cheek and lip; the sweat bedews his brow. Those soft notes recall days of innocence, ere blood had stained his hand, and remorse was gnawing at his heartstrings. The low notes of a mother’s prayer thrill, like some forgotten melody, upon his ear. Again her lips are pressed to his as when she kissed him for the last time, upon his father’s threshold. Tears are streaming down those cheeks, bronzed by burning suns and furrowed by seafoam and tempest; and that voice, whose stern tones had risen above the roar of battle and roused the seaman from his slumbers like the trump of doom, grows all tremulous with emotion as he cries, “God, be merciful to me a sinner.”

SPEECHES

“AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION”

[Delivered at a meeting of the Temperance Society in Boston in 1861]

Were I called upon, Mr. Chairman, to define intemperance by its effects, I would say: “It is that which covers the fields of the husbandman with tares and thorns, and strews the ocean with wrecks. It is that which renders the clerk unfaithful to his employer, the public man to his constituents, the magistrate to his oath of office, the parent to his family, and all who are trusted to every trust. It is that which stirs to mutiny every corrupt passion, weakens every motive to virtue, adds strength to vicious allurements, and pushes the reluctant will over the verge of every damnable and desperate enterprise. So well is this understood by the doers of evil that it is in the armies of evil the regular weapon whose value is unquestioned after the experience of ages. Is a seaman to be enticed to desert his ship or a soldier his colors? Ply him with liquor. Is a ruffian steeped in crime to be urged to some deed of horror from which even his hardened nature revolts? Ply him with liquor. Is a young man with his curiosity awake, his passions pure and jubilant, and his heart throbbing with warm impulses of budding life to be put upon that same descending grade opening to a like abyss of utter loathsomeness, his fair face to be rendered shameless, and his lips to reek of the pit? Then go, thou familiar spirit, whose abode is in the sparkling cup, assume the form of beauty and youth, show him not at once thy craven features, but while his arm is linked in thine, accustom him by slow gradations to the festive and genial cup.”

The ways and methods of doing good are not intuitive. They are, as in the arts and crafts, the result of effort and experience. Good men by long practice into which they have flung their very hearts have learned more and more effective methods of grappling with intemperance. At first they began with cure; now they try prevention, not forgetting the other. Once they went alongside the old hulk stranded on the beach, her masts gone by the board, her rigging white and weather-worn hanging over her bulwarks, ochre hanging from her opening seams, and refitting and relaunching her, they obtained from the stranded hulk a few years of inferior service. Now they buoy the channel and light the beacon, and thus prevent the shipwreck. Noble men went to the inebriate crawling in the gutter; with kindly sympathy they raised him up and restored him to usefulness and power. But who, save the inebriate himself, can tell the bitterness of that struggle between the man, the husband, the father, struggling to rise, and the demon that strives to drag him back? How true it is that that accursed longing never dies! How true it is that we need never learn to drink but once! What temperance reformer is there who has not shed bitter tears over the final wreck of those whom he thought he had saved?

Thus noble efforts were made, multitudes partially, and many really reformed, but all the time behind there was a thronging army of young men treading the same paths. But, taught by experience, men have now begun to grapple with this evil on its strongest ground; that is, in its social aspect, that which is most alluring to the romantic and the young.

I may safely say that from the beginning of social life the great mass of the literature, genius, and wealth of the world has been, and is now, on the side of intemperance. The greatest poets that ever lived have sung in strains of beauty that captivated the young heart the praises of the ruby wine. It has for ages been interwoven with all festivals,--the meeting and parting of social life. It is this more than the love of liquor that attracts. In this view wine becomes the exponent of all that is genial and warm; temperance of all that is cold, forbidding, and repulsive. It is for just this purpose and to meet the enemy at just this point that associations like this have been formed. They seek to show that the flowing bowl is not of necessity the quickener of the intellect, or of all ardent and generous feeling; that it is not the only elixir for the heavy heart. They would show that there are other pleasures as exhilarating as those of the wine cup--pleasures that leave no sting behind. They would show that men can be earnest scholars, sympathetic friends, jovial companions, and at the same time taste not, touch not, and handle not the wine cup, or be under any obligations to alcohol for their enjoyment. May this association in the heart of this great city accomplish its purpose, and be the young man’s friend.

RELIGIOUS WORSHIP EARLY IN THE CENTURY

[Delivered at the Municipal Celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of the town of Portland, Maine, Sunday, July 4, 1886.]