The Hawaiian star. [volume] (Honolulu [Oahu]) 1893-1912, 1900-07-14
A NATIONAL DAY.


July IA is the great national day in
France 1t celebrates nominally the
Fall of the Bastile, but it celebrates far
more than the mere event. 1t celebrates
the fall of a system of government and
in that lies it's merit to consideration
from outsiders. For France, despite
many traits which are repugnant to the
Anglo Saxon; despite extravaganza of
thought and action, has done an i'm
mense work in molding the opinion of
the world, and in setting before us the
very highest ideals.
The Bastile itself was a very ordi-
nary affair. Originally it was a royal
chateau, where very old time kings,
queens, princes and mobiles of various
degrees disported theselves. The name
which has become synonymous with
bolts and bars and prisoners groans,
really means a building, being derived
from the old French word, "baster,"
which has become in modern French,
''bater," and means to build.
After having run a course of nearly
two centuries as a royal residence, the
building was used by Louis XI as a
state prison. and as state prison it re-
manned till July IA, 1889, when it was
demolished by a furious and outraged
populace When levelled to the ground
it had had a career of close on four
hundred years.
Connected with the Bastile are some
of the most dismal annals of French
history and as a fact, of almost any
history though every country of Eu-
rope has its tale of tragedy to tell from
Ugoline who was starved to death
with his children in the tower of Qua
lando, to- the Russian princess who was
drowned in her cell in the Castle of
Stretna. The man with the iron mask
died in the Bastile, and he was one of
= the unsolved mysteries. Who and what
he was will never be known. But it
was not the great ones of their time
that the Bastile dealt with. To it were
consigned many obscure persons, VINO
languished in it's gloomy cells forgotten
by their very nearest and dearest. No
better picture of the utter misery which
the French system brought about, the
utter wrong which was done, can be
read than the account of the imprison-
ment of Dr.. Manette in Charles Dickens
"a Tale of Two Cities" No better brief
could have been written on behalf of
the French revolution than that Eng
lishman's tale. He makes the time live
before you; shows you. through well
~, -I,H-a &c n
what were the mainsprings of action.
And undoubtedly there was frightful
wrong and frightful tyranny. The
worst of it was that even if a man or
woman saw how wrong things We're no
personal effort could right them it re-
quired a cataclysm and the cataclysm
came. When it did come it swept away
the just and the unjust in one vast
avenging wave. 1t regarded not per-
sons; it rolled in black flood which
obliterated every known landmark. The
artificial society which had been built
up on the wrongs of a long suffering
and patient people; a people who did
not know it's own strength, wilted be-
fore the fierce flame of a wrathful ma
ton.
That there We're wrongs done to in
nOcent people is true. That terrible cruz
elites We're committed in the name of
liberty and justice is also true. The
individual suffered for the class. We
all feel sympathy for Marie Antoinette,
the high born, delicately nurtured
woman, dragged to execution by yell
ing and ribald mob. We shudder when
we read the details of the murder of
the Princess Lamballe with it's name
less horrors of death. But we have to
think of the centuries of cruel wrong
and oppression which went Lefore, of
the grinding system of tyranny and
taxation which had been borne by gem
Grafton after generation of Frenchmen.
When we realize this we understand
why the republic celebrates he Fall of
the Bastile. 1t typified to France the
wrongs of centuries; its fall was the
tocsin which called a nation to qVenge
itself of its wrongs, and its effect lives
as strongly now in the breasts of
Frenchmen as it did when it first hap
pened, more than a century ago.