Latter-Day Pamphlets | Page 7

the sound of its
bewildered thousand-fold voice is in all writings and speakings, in all
thinkings and modes and activities of men: the soul that does not now,
with hope or terror, discern it, is not the one we address on this
occasion.
What is Democracy; this huge inevitable Product of the Destinies,

which is everywhere the portion of our Europe in these latter days?
There lies the question for us. Whence comes it, this universal big
black Democracy; whither tends it; what is the meaning of it? A
meaning it must have, or it would not be here. If we can find the right
meaning of it, we may, wisely submitting or wisely resisting and
controlling, still hope to live in the midst of it; if we cannot find the
right meaning, if we find only the wrong or no meaning in it, to live
will not be possible!--The whole social wisdom of the Present Time is
summoned, in the name of the Giver of Wisdom, to make clear to itself,
and lay deeply to heart with an eye to strenuous valiant practice and
effort, what the meaning of this universal revolt of the European
Populations, which calls itself Democracy, and decides to continue
permanent, may be.
Certainly it is a drama full of action, event fast following event; in
which curiosity finds endless scope, and there are interests at stake,
enough to rivet the attention of all men, simple and wise. Whereat the
idle multitude lift up their voices, gratulating, celebrating sky-high; in
rhyme and prose announcement, more than plentiful, that now the New
Era, and long-expected Year One of Perfect Human Felicity has come.
Glorious and immortal people, sublime French citizens, heroic
barricades; triumph of civil and religious liberty--O Heaven! one of the
inevitablest private miseries, to an earnest man in such circumstances,
is this multitudinous efflux of oratory and psalmody, from the universal
foolish human throat; drowning for the moment all reflection
whatsoever, except the sorrowful one that you are fallen in an evil,
heavy-laden, long-eared age, and must resignedly bear your part in the
same. The front wall of your wretched old crazy dwelling, long
denounced by you to no purpose, having at last fairly folded itself over,
and fallen prostrate into the street, the floors, as may happen, will still
hang on by the mere beam-ends, and coherency of old carpentry,
though in a sloping direction, and depend there till certain poor rusty
nails and worm-eaten dovetailings give way:--but is it cheering, in such
circumstances, that the whole household burst forth into celebrating the
new joys of light and ventilation, liberty and picturesqueness of
position, and thank God that now they have got a house to their mind?
My dear household, cease singing and psalmodying; lay aside your
fiddles, take out your work-implements, if you have any; for I can say

with confidence the laws of gravitation are still active, and rusty nails,
worm-eaten dovetailings, and secret coherency of old carpentry, are not
the best basis for a household!--In the lanes of Irish cities, I have heard
say, the wretched people are sometimes found living, and perilously
boiling their potatoes, on such swing-floors and inclined planes
hanging on by the joist-ends; but I did not hear that they sang very
much in celebration of such lodging. No, they slid gently about, sat
near the back wall, and perilously boiled their potatoes, in silence for
most part!--
High shouts of exultation, in every dialect, by every vehicle of speech
and writing, rise from far and near over this last avatar of Democracy in
1848: and yet, to wise minds, the first aspect it presents seems rather to
be one of boundless misery and sorrow. What can be more miserable
than this universal hunting out of the high dignitaries, solemn
functionaries, and potent, grave and reverend signiors of the world; this
stormful rising-up of the inarticulate dumb masses everywhere, against
those who pretended to be speaking for them and guiding them? These
guides, then, were mere blind men only pretending to see? These rulers
were not ruling at all; they had merely got on the attributes and clothes
of rulers, and were surreptitiously drawing the wages, while the work
remained undone? The Kings were Sham-Kings, play-acting as at
Drury Lane;--and what were the people withal that took them for real?
It is probably the hugest disclosure of falsity in human things that was
ever at one time made. These reverend Dignitaries that sat amid their
far-shining symbols and long-sounding long-admitted professions,
were mere Impostors, then? Not a true thing they were doing, but a
false thing. The story they told men was a cunningly devised fable; the
gospels they preached to them were not an account of man's real
position in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of