BOSTON: PHILLIPS, SAMPSON AND COMPANY, 110 Washington Street . 1850. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, BY PHILLIPS, SAMPSON AND COMPANY, In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of Massachusetts. STEREOTYPED BY CHARLES W. COLTON, No. 2 Water Street....

Through the past year, M. de Lamartine has published a monthly journal, called The People’s Counsellor, “ Le Conseiller du Peuple .” Each number of this journal contains an Essay, by him, on some specific subject, of pressing interest to the French people,—generally, some political subject. As a companion to one of these numbers, he published the Essay which we here translate. We have thought that its interest and merit are by no means local; but, that it will be read with as much interest in Am

I have often asked myself, “Why am I a Republican?—Why am I the partizan of equitable Democracy, organized and established as a good and strong Government?—Why have I a real love of the People—a love always serious, and sometimes even tender?—What has the People done for me? I was not born in the ranks of the People. I was born between the high Aristocracy and what was then called the inferior classes , in the days when there were classes, where are now equal citizens in various callings. I neve

“And what is there in common,” you will say to me, “between your belief in God and your love for the People?” I answer: My belief in God is not that vague, confused, indefinite, shadowy sentiment which compels one to suppose a principle because he sees consequences,—a cause where he contemplates effects, a source where he sees the rush of the inexhaustible river of life, of forms, of substances, absorbed for ever in the ocean, and renewed unceasingly from creation. The belief in God, which is th

Faith, or reasonable and effective belief in God, proceeds, undoubtedly, from this first instinct; but in proportion as intelligence develops itself, and human thought expands, it goes from knowledge to knowledge, from conclusion to conclusion, from light to light, from sentiment to sentiment, infinitely farther and higher, in the idea of God. It does not see him with the eyes of the body, because the Infinite is not visible by a narrow window of flesh, pierced in the frontal bone of an insect c

It is in this sense, my friends, that I say to you, “I believe in God.” But, once having said this word with the universe of beings and of worlds, and blessed this invisible God for having rendered himself visible, sensible, evident, palpable, adorable in the mirror of weak human intelligence, made gradually more and more pure, I reason with myself on the best worship to be rendered Him in thought and action. Let me show how, by this reasoning, I am forcibly drawn to the love of the People. I sa

God, when one believes in Him as you and I do, imposes then on man a duty towards the society of which he makes a part. You admit it, do you not? Then follow, and analyze with me this society. Of whom, and how, is it composed? It is composed, at the same time, of strong and weak, conquerors and conquered, victors and vanquished, oppressors and oppressed, masters and slaves, nobles and serfs, of citizens and bondmen or subjects disinherited and enslaved, considered as living furniture, as tools a

The love of the People, the conscience of the citizen, the sentiment which induces the individual to lose himself in the mass, to submit himself to the community, to sacrifice himself to its needs,—his interest, his individuality, his egotism, his ambition, his pride, his fortune, his blood, his life, his reputation even, sometimes, to the safety of his country, to the happiness of the People, to the good of humanity, of which he is a member in the sight of God,—in one word, all these virtues, n

Must I demonstrate to you so simple a truth? Can you not comprehend, without explanation of mine, that a nation, where each citizen thinks only of his own private well-being here below, and sacrifices constantly the general good to his personal and narrow interest;—where the powerful man wishes to preserve all the power for himself alone, without making an equitable and proportional division to the weak;—where the weak wishes to conquer at any price, that he may tyrannize in his turn;—where the

Sometimes the masses have been driven to Atheism by science. There are some geometers great in paradox, men who, of all the senses that the Creator has given to his creatures, have cultivated only one, the sense of touch,—leaving out entirely that chief sense, which connects and confirms all others,— the sense of the invisible , the moral sense . These savans , geometers, physicians, arithmeticians, mathematicians, chemists, astronomers, measurers of distances, calculators of numbers, have early

Besides these men, there is still another class,—inventors of another science, which they call “ Political Economy .” This is the class of Economists . I do not, indeed, speak of all of them: there are among them some who are as spiritual as Fenelon, and these are, perhaps, at this day, the greater number. I speak only of those who, considering this world alone, have been driven, voluntarily or involuntarily, to Atheism in another way. Leaving the eternal and fastidious metaphysical and religion

But that People which forgets God, forgets itself. What right has it to be a People, if it have not its origin and hope in Him? How can the men of any nation expect tyrants to remember and respect its destiny, if they themselves debase this destiny to that of a machine with ten fingers, destined to weave the greatest possible number of yards of cloth in seventy years, to people as many hundred acres as possible with creatures as much to be pitied and as miserable as themselves, and to serve, fro

But even this is nothing. The French Revolution came in 1789. It came to put an end to a double philosophy,—the spiritual philosophy of Rousseau’s school, founded in reason and religion, the material philosophy of the school of Helvetius, Diderot, and their disciples, atheistic and cynical. The thought of the first of these philosophies was religious at bottom. It consisted merely in freeing the luminous idea of God from the shadows by which ignorance, intolerance, the inquisition of temporal dy

The Republic had passed its paroxysm of fever, of demagoguical madness, of persecution. The Directory had finally concentrated and regulated the republican power. This government was composed of men, naturally moderate and tolerant, or made so by the experience and the lassitude of anarchy; the moderate principles of the Revolution of 1789, and of the constituted Assembly, regained their level, thanks to a natural reaction, limited by good sense, as happens after every revolution that overshoots

This system was continued, with more sincerity on the part of government, under the dynasty of the Restoration. But the interested favors of the Court, for the higher clergy of a particular worship, irritated the minds of the populace against the priesthood. The more it lavished power and human dignities upon priestly superiors, the more the mind of the People turned from the religious sentiment. Each favor of royal authority to the privileged Church cast thousands of souls into Atheism. The Rev

For eighteen years, new sects, or, rather, posthumous sects, have disputed for the soul of the People, under the names of Fourierism, of Pantheism, of Communism, of Industrialism, of Economism, and, finally, of Terrorism. Look at them, listen to them, read them, analyze them, sift them, handle them; and say, if, with the exception of a vague deifying of every thing,—that is to say, of nothing, by the Fourierites,—there is a single one of these philosophical, social, or political sects, which is

Analyze with me, if you are not overwhelmed with humiliation, the five or six Revelations of the latter days; and ask yourselves, as I have often asked myself, while listening to them, if these revealers of pretended human felicity do indeed address themselves to men, or to herds of fatted cattle! And are they astonished that the intellectual world resists them? Do they complain that the ignorant are their only disciples? Are they indignant that the ideas they attempt to spread, creep, like feti

See where we were when the Republic arose: happy was it that the People had at bottom more of the true sentiment of God than these masters and heads of sects. For, what would have become of us, if, in that total eclipse of government, of armed force, and of law, which followed the 24th of February, the People, masters of all, of the fortunes and lives of the citizens, of Heaven and earth, had been a People of Materialists, of Terrorists, and of Atheists? The Revolution would have been a pillage,

Thus, look at every free People, from the mountains of Helvetia to the forests of America; see even the free British nation, where the Aristocracy is only the head of liberty, where the Aristocracy and Democracy mutually respect each other, and balance each other by an exchange of kindnesses and services which sanctify society while fortifying it. Atheism has fled before liberty: in proportion as despotism has receded, the divine idea has advanced in the souls of men. Liberty lives by morality.

Open the history of America, the history of England, and the history of France; read the great lives, the great deaths, the great sufferings, the sublime words, when the ruling passion of life reveals itself in the last moments of the dying,—and compare them! Washington and Franklin fought, spoke, suffered; rose and fell, in their political life, from popularity to ingratitude, from glory to bitter scorn of their citizens,—always in the name of God, for whom they acted; and the liberator of Amer

If you wish that this revolution should not have the same end, beware of abject Materialism, degrading Sensualism, gross Socialism, of besotted Communism; of all these doctrines of flesh and blood, of meat and drink, of hunger and thirst, of wages and traffic, which these corruptors of the soul of the People preach to you, exclusively, as the sole thought, the sole hope, as the only duty, and only end of man! They will soon make you slaves of ease, serfs of your desires. Are you willing to have