my own country, those only, who wore it, have been respected who used it
as a covering to ambition. In other nations, the free stood aloof when
the charter of their own rights was violated in the invasion of ours.
I cannot forget that the senate of that England, where you promise me
a home, rang with insulting plaudits when her statesman breathed
his ridicule on our weakness, not his sympathy for our cause; and
I--fanatic--dreamer--enthusiast, as I may be called, whose whole life
has been one unremitting struggle for the opinion I have adopted, am
at least not so blinded by my infatuation, but I can see the mockery
it incurs. If I die on the scaffold to-morrow, I shall have nothing of
martyrdom but its doom; not the triumph--the incense--the immortality of
popular applause: I should have no hope to support me at such a moment,
gleaned from the glories of the future--nothing but one stern and
prophetic conviction of the vanity of that tyranny by which my sentence
will be pronounced." Riego paused for a moment before he resumed, and
his pale and death-like countenance received an awful and unnatural
light from the intensity of the feeling that swelled and burned within
him. His figure was drawn up to its full height, and his voice rang
through the lonely hills with a deep and hollow sound, that had in it a
tone of prophecy, as he resumed "It is in vain that they oppose OPINION;
anything else they may subdue. They may conquer wind, water, nature
itself; but to the progress of that secret, subtle, pervading spirit,
their imagination can devise, their strength can accomplish, no bar: its
votaries they may seize, they may destroy; itself they cannot touch.
If they check it in one place, it invades them in another. They cannot
build a wall across the whole earth; and, even if they could, it
would pass over its summit! Chains cannot bind it, for it is
immaterial--dungeons enclose it, for it is universal. Over the faggot
and the scaffold--over the bleeding bodies of its defenders which they
pile against its path, it sweeps on with a noiseless but unceasing
march. Do they levy armies against it, it presents to them no palpable
object to oppose. Its camp is the universe; its asylum is the bosoms of
their own soldiers. Let them depopulate, destroy as they please, to
each extremity of the earth; but as long as they have a single supporter
themselves--as long as they leave a single individual into whom that
spirit can enter--so long t