personal liberty to obey the plainest dictates of humanity? There are things, as I have already intimated, which ought to be dearer to us than life, which may be exposed to suffer loss; and which are exposed to harm at this very hour by the bad administration of our public concerns.

No doubt, these quiet people who have been so savagely butchered in the streets of Paris, little dreamed, when they left their homes that day, that they would be shot down as the enemies of the Government. They had nothing to do with the Government. They had no thought of crossing its path. They were pursuing the even tenor of their own quiet way. They desired only to mind their own business. And yet, had they been taking the most active interest in public affairs, they could not possibly have come to so miserable an end, as I will presently show.

The simple, religious truth is, and the sooner every man accepts it, and makes up his mind and his life to it, the better for him, for our country, and for the world—the plain truth is, that 'no man liveth or can live to himself'—that the interests, the highest interests, the personal character and salvation, the very life of the individual, in the most obvious and in the profoundest sense of the word, life, is wrapt up with the interests of the whole; in other words, with the public interest, with public affairs. We cannot—no man can separate himself and stand apart, and insist upon being ignorant and indifferent. It lies within our own will to say, whether we will meet and endeavor to answer the claims which the welfare of the whole has upon us, whether we will take a lively interest in the public interest; but it is not a matter of our own will whether we shall suffer or not. We may choose whether or not we will act; but the consequences, and they may be most deadly,—the consequences of our action or our no-action we cannot escape. They may fall upon us with a crushing power at our very firesides, and ruin our private and domestic peace for ever. So long as we live in society, and build our houses near our neighbors, we may or may not take an interest in the public provision which is made against fire, but we cannot avoid the danger and the consequences of a conflagration. Because a man keeps himself retired, never reading, never thinking about what is going on on the public theatre of the world, he has no security against being shot down like a dog in the streets, as the case of those unfortunate citizens of Paris shows.

Certainly then, since we are liable to suffer from public affairs taking a wrong direction, whether we take an interest in them or not, it is worth our while to suffer for a cause. There is small comfort in incurring danger and in losing one's life for nothing. If we must suffer, when public events go wrong, it is best by far to suffer for something. For in times of universal alarm and disorder, when property and life are put in peril, they suffer the least, though they lose everything, who are inspired by the conviction that they have tried to be faithful and to do their duty. They have a life in them which bullets and bayonets and cannon-balls cannot reach. When men perish for a cause to which they were utterly indifferent, for which they cared nothing, of which they knew nothing, then they perish as the brutes perish. Then death comes to them as a fatal accident; and the only moral that can be drawn from their fate, is that it is folly for men to think to live unto themselves. No glory shines from their graves; no renown immortalizes their memories. But when men suffer and die for a cause, into which they have thrown their whole souls, when they perish for a principle, then their death is noble, and they do not die like the brutes, but like men. Then they are heroes and martyrs, and though dead, they speak with mighty angel voices; and their blood hallows for