man point out any of them that, so far as depended on me, was left undone. If, then, it should be asked by what means Philip for the most part succeeded in his operations, every one would answer, By his army, by his largesses, by corrupting those at the head of affairs. Well, then, I neither had armies, nor did I command them; and therefore the argument respecting military operations cannot touch me. Nay, in so far as I was inaccessible to bribes, there I conquered Philip! For, as he who purchases any one overcomes him who has received the price and sold himself, so he who will not take the money, nor consent to be bribed, has conquered the bidder. Thus, as far as I am concerned, this country stands unconquered. • 9. CATALINE DENOUNCED. - Cicero. Cicero, the greatest of Roman orators, was born at Arpinum, 106 B. C., two hundred and six teen years after the death of Demosthenes. Having taken part against Antony, after the assassination of Cæsar, Cicero was proscribed. He was murdered by a party of soldiers, headed by Popilius Lænas, whose life he had formerly saved by his eloquence; and his head and hards were publicly exhibited on the rostrum at Rome. He perished in his sixty-fourth year, 43 B. C. His writings are voluminous. As an orator, Cicero ranks next to Demosthenes; and his orations against Catiline and Verres are masterpieces of denunciatory eloquence. How far, O Catiline, wilt thou abuse our patience? How long shalt thou baffle justice in thy mad career? To what extreme wilt thou carry thy audacity? Art thou nothing daunted by the nightly watch, posted to secure the Palatium? Nothing, by the city guards? Nothing, by the rally of all good citizens? Nothing, by the assembling of the Senate in this fortified place? Nothing, by the averted looks of all here present? Seest thou not that all thy plots are exposed? that thy wretched conspiracy is laid bare to every man's knowledge, here in the Senate ?- that we are well aware of thy proceedings of last night; of the night before; the place of meeting, the company convoked, the measures concerted? Alas, the times! Alas, the public morals! The Senate understands all this. The Consul sees it. Yet the traitor lives! Lives? Ay, truly, and confronts us here in council, takes part in our deliberations, and, with his measuring eye, marks out each man of us for slaughter! And we, all this while, strenuous that we are, think we have amply discharged our duty to the State, if we but shun this madman's sword and fury! Long since, O Catiline, ought the Consul to have ordered thee to execution, and brought upon thy own head the ruin thou hast been Ineditating against others! There was that virtue once in Rome, that a wicked citizen was held more execrable than the deadliest foe. We have a law still, Catiline, for thee. Think not that we are powerless, because forbearing. We have a decree,-though it rests among our archives like a sword in its scabbard, -a decree, by which thy life would be made to pay the forfeit of thy crimes. And, should I order thee to be instantly seized and put to death, I make just doubt whether all good men would not think it done rather too late. than any man cruelly But, for good reasons, I will yet defer the blow long since deserved. Then will I doom thee, when no man is found, so lost, so wicked, nay, so like thyself, but shall confess that it was justly dealt. While there is one man that dares defend thee, live! But thou shalt live so beset, so surrounded, so scrutinized, by the vigilant guards that I have placed around thee, that thou shalt not stir a foot against the Republic, without my knowledge. There shall be eyes to detect thy slightest movement, and ears to catch thy wariest whis per, of which thou shalt not dream. The darkness of night shalt not cover thy treason - the walls of privacy shall not stifle its voice. Baffled on all sides, thy most secret counsels clear as noon-day, what canst thou now have in view? Proceed, plot, conspire, as thou wilt; there is nothing you can contrive, nothing you can propose, nothing you can attempt, which I shall not know, hear and promptly understand. Thou shalt soon be made aware that I am even more active in providing for the preservation of the State, than thou in plotting its destruction! 10. CATILINE EXPELLED. - Cicero Ar length, Romans, we are rid of Catiline! We have driven him forth, drunk with fury, breathing mischief, threatening to revisit us with fire and sword. He is gone; he is fled; he has escaped; he has broken away. No longer, within the very walls of the city, shall he plot her ruin. We have forced him from secret plots into open rebellion. The bad citizen is now the avowed traitor. His fight is the confession of his treason! Would that his attendants had not been so few! Be speedy, ye companions of his dissolute pleasures; be speedy, and you may overtake him before night, on the Aurelian road. Let him not languish, deprived of your society. Haste to join the congenial crew that compose his army; his army, I say, for who doubts that the army under Manlius expect Catiline for their leader? And such an army! Outcasts from honor, and fugitives from debt; gamblers and felons; miscreants, whose dreams are of rapine, murder and conflagration! Against these gallant troops of your adversary, prepare, O Romans, your garrisons and armies; and first to that maimed and battered. gladiator oppose your Consuls and Generals; next, against that miserable, outcast horde, lead forth the strength and flower of all Italy! On the one side chastity contends; on the other, wantonness: here purity, there pollution; here integrity, there treachery; here piety, there profaneness; here constancy, there rage; here honesty, there baseness; here continence, there lust; in short, equity, temperance, fortitude, prudence, struggle with iniquity, luxury, cowardice, rashness; every virtue with every vice; and, lastly, the contest lies between well-grounded hope and absolute despair. In such a conflict, were even human aid to fail, would not the immortal Gods empower such conspicuous virtue to triumph over such complicated vice? AN opinion has long prevailed, Fathers, that, in public prosecutions, men of wealth, however clearly convicted, are always safe. This opinion, so injurious to your order, so detrimental to the State, it is now in your power to refute. A man is on trial before you who is rich, and who hopes his riches will compass his acquittal; but whose life and actions are his sufficient condemnation in the eyes of all candid men. 1. speak of Caius Verres, who, if he now receive not the sentence his crimes deserve, it shall not be through the lack of a criminal, or of a prosecutor; but through the failure of the ministers of justice to do their duty. Passing over the shameful irregularities of his youth, what does the quæstorship of Verres exhibit but one continued scene of villanies? The public treasure squandered, a Consul stripped and betrayed, an army deserted and reduced to want, a province robbed, the civil and religious rights of a People trampled on! But his prætorship in Sicily has crowned his career of wickedness, and completed the lasting monument of his infamy. His decisions have violated all law, all precedent, all right. His extortions from the industrious poor have been beyond computation. Our most faithful allies have been treated as enemies. Roman citizens have, like slaves, been put to death with tortures. Men the most worthy have been condemned and banished without a hearing, while the most atrocious criminals have, with money, purchased exemption from the punishment due to their guilt. I ask now, Verres, what have you to advance against these charges? Art thou not the tyrant prætor, who, at no greater distance than Sicily, within sight of the Italian coast, dared to put to an infamous death, on the cross, that ill-fated and innocent citizen, Publius Gavius Cosanus? And what was his offence? He had declared his intention of appealing to the justice of his country against your brutal persecutions! For this, when about to embark for home, he was seized, brought before you, charged with being a spy, scourged and tortured. In vain did he exclaim: "I am a Roman citizen! I have served under Lucius Pretius, who is now at Panormus, and who will attest my innocence!" Deaf to all remonstrance, remorseless, thirsting for innocent blood, you ordered the savage punishment to be inflicted! While the sacred words, "I am a Roman citizen," were on his lips, words which, in the remotest regions, are a passport to protection, you ordered him to death, to a death upon the cross! O liberty! O sound once delightful to every Roman ear! O sacred privilege of Roman citizenship! once sacred, now trampled on! Is it come to this? Shall an inferior magistrate, a governor, who holds his whole power of the Roman People, in a Roman prov ince, within sight of Italy, bind, scourge, torture, and put to an infamous death, a Roman citizen? Shall neither the cries of innocence expiring in agony, the tears of pitying spectators, the majesty of the Roman Commonwealth, nor the fear of the justice of his country. restrain the merciless monster, who, in the confidence of his riches, strikes at the very root of liberty, and sets nankind at defiance? And shall this man escape? Fathers, it must not be! It must not be, unless you would undermine the very foundations of social safety, strangle justice, and call down anarchy, massacre and ruin, on the Commonwealth! 12. AGAINST THE NOBILITY AND CLERGY OF PROVENCE, FEB. 3, 1789.Original Translation from Mirabeau. Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, was born at Bignon, in France, on the 9th of March, 1749. The early part of his life was one of disorder and misery. The French Revolution offered a field for his energies. Being rejected, at the time of the elections, by the nobil ity of Provence, he hired a warehouse, put up this inscription,-"Mirabeau, woollen-draper,"and was elected deputy from the third estate of Aix. Ilis contemporaries speak of the effect of his eloquence as surprising and irresistible. "He trod the tribune with the supreme author ity of a master, and the imperial air of a king." Personally, he was quite ugly. He himself has said, in a letter to a lady who had not seen him :-"Imagine a tiger scarred with the small pox, and you may form some notion of my features." "He was a man," says one of his crit ics, "who, by his qualities no less than by the singularity of his fortune, is destined to take his place in history by the side of the Demosthenes, the Gracchi, and the other kindred spirits of an antiquity whose gigantic characteristics he so frequently reproduced." He died 1791. In the French National Assembly, every speaker who addresses that body formally, instead of speaking from his seat, as in the legislative halls of England and the United States, ascendi an elevated platform, or pulpit, called a tribune, from which he makes his harangue. In all countries, in all ages, have aristocrats implacably pursued the friends of the People; and when, by I know not what combination of fortune, such a friend has uprisen from the very bosom of the aristoc racy, it has been at him preeminently that they have struck, eager to inspire wider terror by the elevation of their victim. So perished the last of the Gracchi by the hands of the Patricians. But, mortally smitten, he flung dust towards Heaven, calling the avenging Gods to witness: and, from that dust, sprang Marius; Marius, less illustrious for having exterminated the Cimbri than for having beaten down the despotism of the nobility in Rome. But you, Commons, listen to one, who, unseduced by your applauses, yet cherishes them in his heart. Man is strong only by union; happy only by peace. Be firm, not obstinate; courageous, not turbulent; free, not undisciplined; prompt, not precipitate. Stop not except at difficulties of moment; and be then wholly inflexible. But disdain the contentions of self-love, and never thrust into the balance the individ ual against the country. Above all, hasten, as much as in you lies the epoch of those States-General, from which you are charged with flinching, the more acrimoniously charged, the more your accusers dread the results; of those States-General, through which so many pretensions will be scattered, so many rights reestablished, so many evils reformed; of those States-General, in short, through which the monarch himself desires that France should regenerate herself. -- For myself, who, in my public career, have had no other fear but that of wrong-doing, who, girt with my conscience, and armed with my principles, would brave the universe, whether it shall be my for tune to serve you with my voice and my exertions in the Nationa Assembly, or whether I shall be enabled to aid you there with my prayers only, be sure that the vain clamors, the wrathful menaces, the injurious protestations, all the convulsions, in a word, of expiring prejudices, shall not on me impose! What! shall he now pause in his civic course, who, first among all the men of France, emphatically proclaimed his opinions on national affairs, at a time when circumstances were much less urgent than now, and the task one of much greater peril? Never! No measure of outrages shall bear down my patience. I have been, I am, I shall be, even to the tomb, the man of the Public Liberty, the man of the Constitution. If to be such be to become the man of the People rather than of the Nobles, then woe to the privileged orders! For privileges shall have an end, but the People is eternal! 13. NECKER'S FINANCIAL PLAN, SEPT. 26, 1789.-Mirabeau. Orig. Translation. Necker, the minister of finance, having proposed an income tax of twenty-five per cent., with other measures, in view of the desperate state of the financial affairs of France, the proposition was advocated by Mirabeau, who did not, however, profess to comprehend or endorse all its details. Although a known enemy to the minister, he magnanimously made two speeches in behalf of his measure; without, however, inducing the Assembly to pass it, until, on the eve of its being rejected, Mirabeau rushed to the Tribune, and poured forth a last appeal, an abridg ment of which is here given. This speech proved effectual. The Assembly received it with shouts of enthusiasm; and Necker's plan was adopted. Madame de Stael (Necker's daughter), who was near Mirabeau at the time of the delivery of this speech, says that "its effect was prodigious." THE minister of finance has presented a most alarming picture of the state of our affairs. He has assured us that delay must aggravate the peril; and that a day, an hour, an instant, may render it fatal. We have no plan that can be substituted for that which he proposes. On this plan, therefore, we must fall back. But, have we time, Gentlemen ask, to examine it, to probe it thoroughly, and verify its calçulations? No, no! a thousand times no' Hap-hazard conjectures, insignificant inquiries, gropings that can but mislead, — these are all that we can give to it now. Shall we therefore miss the decisive moment? Do Gentlemen hope to escape sacrifices and taxation by a plunge into national bankruptcy? What, then, is bankruptcy, but the most cruel, the most iniquitous, most unequal and disastrous of imposts? Listen to me for one moment ! Two centuries of plunder and abuse have dug the abyss which threatens to engulf the Nation. It must be filled up-this terrible chasm. But how? Here is a list of proprietors. Choose from the wealthiest, in order that the smallest number of citizens may be sacrificed. But choose! Shall not a few perish, that the mass of the People may be saved? Come, then! Here are two thousand Notables, whose property will supply the deficit. Restore order to your finances, peace and prosperity to the Kingdom! Strike! Immolate, without mercy, these unfortunate victims! Hurl them into the abyss! - It closes! You recoil with dismay from the contemplation. Inconsistent and pusillanimous! What! Do you not perceive that, in decreeing a public bankruptcy, or, what is worse, in rendering it inevitable with |