or most part!--

High shouts of exultation, in every dialect, by every vehicle of speech
and writing, rise from far and near over this last avatar of Democracy
in 1848: and yet, to wise minds, the first aspect it presents seems
rather to be one of boundless misery and sorrow. What can be more
miserable than this universal hunting out of the high dignitaries,
solemn functionaries, and potent, grave and reverend signiors of
the world; this stormful rising-up of the inarticulate dumb masses
everywhere, against those who pretended to be speaking for them and
guiding them? These guides, then, were mere blind men only pretending
to see? These rulers were not ruling at all; they had merely got on the
attributes and clothes of rulers, and were surreptitiously drawing
the wages, while the work remained undone? The Kings were Sham-Kings,
play-acting as at Drury Lane;--and what were the people withal that took
them for real?

It is probably the hugest disclosure of _falsity_ in human things that
was ever at one time made. These reverend Dignitaries that sat amid
their far-shining symbols and long-sounding long-admitted professions,
were mere Impostors, then? Not a true thing they were doing, but a
false thing. The story they told men was a cunningly devised fable; the
gospels they preached to them were not an account of man's real position
in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of dead ghosts and unborn
shadows, of traditions, cants, indolences, cowardices,--a falsity
of falsities, which at last _ceases_ to stick together. Wilfully and
against their will, these high units of mankind were cheats, then; and
the low millions who believed in them were dupes,--a kind of _inverse_
cheats, too, or they would not have believed in them so long. A
universal _Bankruptcy of Imposture_; that may be the brief definition
of it. Imposture everywhere declared once more to be contrary to Nature;
nobody will change its word into an act any farther:--fallen insolvent;
unable to keep its head up by these false pretences, or make its pot
boil any more for the present! A more scandalous phenomenon, wide as
Europe, never afflicted the face of the sun. Bankruptcy everywhere; foul
ignominy, and the abomination of desolation, in all high places: odious
to look upon, as the carnage of a battle-field on the morrow morning;--a
massacre not of the innocents; we cannot call it a massacre of the
innocents; but a universal tumbling of Impostors and of Impo