The Lambertville record. [volume] (Lambertville, N.J.) 1872-1968, 1873-08-20
MISCELLANY.



The human conscience, manifested in his
tory, recalls that its glorious epochs have been
those of the flourishing of republics. The
federation of Israel dictated the moral law by
which our conduct is still ruled, and educated
those prophets whose imprecations against
kings still infiame the hearts of our various
peoples, and whose hopes of redemption still
animate the religious ideas of our various
civilizations. The Greek republic began the
aesthetic education of the human race, and
founded at once the eternal form of art and
the spirit of science, shaping with the chisel
in stone those statues, immortal forms of
plastic beauty, and with its ideas in society
the first citizens of democracy. The founda-
tions of civil right in the west of Europe and
in the Latin races are due to another republic
the Roman. While it lasted its heroes were
worthy to employ, under the empire, the pen
of Plutarch, while the greatest emperors only
merited the stole sentence of Tacitus, or the
shameful ignominy of the Augustine history
In the modern world continues this prodigious
vitality of the republic All the glories of
Italy, in the Middle Ages, are connected with
this form of government. In the republic
We're educated the genius who painted the
q Last Supper" the genius who modelled the
g Perseus," and he who filled with his Cyclic
pean epopee the vaults of the Sistine Chapel.
When that republic the new Athens, fell at
last, Michael Angelo moulded in marble o
naked woman with the Greek beauty and the
Christian soul, put grief in her face and
sleep on her eyelids, and called her Night, y
indicating that eternal night had come over
the human conscience when SO clear star
was extinguished in its sky. And, ii, fact,
Pisa, which gave life to stone Florence,
which revived the Greek genius Genoa,
which awakened commerce, and invented ex-
change, and gave birth to the discoverer of
America; Venice which filled with the won
ders of the East, bathed in the first light of
creation, the sombre days of the Middle Ages
all surrounded by choruses of artists whose
works form the Gases of consolation in the
desert of life--all are republics Such also
were those municipalities of Spain, those COM
munities of France, those free cities of Ger
many, which checked feudalism, which SUBJ
stituted for the jurisdiction of the baron the
jurisdiction of the jury, which established the
foundations of property, which became the
artifcers of liberty and of wealth. So also
was that Alpine people, the immortal con-
querors of tyrants in the defles Of their
mountains and on the borders of their lakes,
like the Greeks in their Thermopyle and
Salamis. And republican also was that little
nation which robbed from the ocean the space
to establish its homes, true temples of liberty,
of commerce, and of thought. Republican
also was that glorious society which arose at
the end of the last century, it's sentiments
fortified in the Democratic maxims of the
Gospel, its reasons in the ideas of science, to
place itself at the head of the republican
movement which is the honor and the glory of
America. And it was republican France
which conquered all the kings of Europe, and
sowed the first ideas of progress, which are
at least to regenerate all peoples in Democracy.
-EMILIo CASTELAR,, in Harper's Magazine
for September.