Marshall County Republican. (Plymouth, Ind.) 1856-1878, 1874-01-15

Ringing Letter from Alexander Delmar,
OF New York, to the Illinois Farmers
Association
BROOKLYN, N Y, Dec. 13, 1873.
DEAR SIR: Your polite invitation to
attend the meeting in Decatur, or to adj
dress it by letter, was received to-day.
Ny heart is with you, and / should have
been glad to come, but cannot well
get away. must, therefore, write.
Your cause is my cause it is that of
my children, who are growing up around
me in letters to unjust laws 1t is that
OF the many it is that of the country,
which by reason of this injustice is
steadily drifting into another civil war;
Only those who have rendered them
selves familiar with the suffer1ngs of
the French previous to the First Revo-
lution can measure the prvocatlon which
led to the bloody Reign of Terror. The
tyranny and scorn of the land owners
for the peasantry; the venality of the
courts of law, which always sided with
the rich; the corruption of men and de-
basement of women by the aristocracy
the infamous pare aur ceyJs, where the
dissolute monarch kept seragho of 500
abducted girls; the disregard of pie
beian life and limb by the nobility, who
drove over and trampled down with
horses tie Flooding pedestrians of the
country road or city lane the lettres de
cachet, or blank orders of imprison-
ment, by aid of which they threw all
who opposed them, and whom they
could not destroy, into secret and loath-
some dungeons all these offenses COM
bined might have tailed to bring about
the Revolution, for they were offenses
against individuals. They were felt
only by those against whom they were
directed the rest escaped and such
is the selfish nature of men and their
well-grounded horror of cemmotion and
anarchy, that, unless they are made to
suffer in common, they seldom revolt.
But added to these crimes of the rich
were the universal serfdom and wretch
edness they inflicted upon the poor
through the laws of monopoly and taxa
ton. These were blows that fell upon
the backs OF all the people at once-the
blows that evoked the avengeful and
CORY gulllotine.
In this view / am supported by the
writings of a man for whom the world,
and particularly the agricultural world,
has garnered up hundred years of
rofoand respect and esteem-I mean
Arthur Young. This man was an En-
glish farmer, who travelled through
France in the years 1877, 1888 and 1889,
and closely observed and recorded every
detail relating to the economical and
social condition of that country at that
eventful iuncture. Without reference
to his immortal So Travels, no complete
work on the French Revolution ever has
been, or ever can be, written; and these
are the words with which he commences
lris twelfth chapter
ssThe gross infamy which attended
lettres de cachet and the Bastile, during
the reign of Louis XIV, made them
esteemed In England, by people not
well informed, as the most prominent
features of the despotism of France.
They were certainly carried to an excess
hardly credible-to the length of being
sold with blanks to be filed up with
names at the pleasure of the purchaser,
who was thus able, In the qualification
of private revenge, to tear man from
the bosom of his family and bury him
In q dungeon, where he would exist for
gotten and die unknown But such
excuses could not be common In any
cauntry; and they were reduced almost
to nothing upon the accession of the
H. -