heroes and martyrs, and though dead, they speak with
mighty angel voices; and their blood hallows for ever the spot on which
it is shed, 'down to earth's profound, and up to Heaven,' and they
become immortal in the affection and reverence of mankind, and in the
influence which they exert upon the course of human affairs. For this
reason it is, that I said just now, that those quiet people who have
been killed in the streets of Paris, could not have perished so
miserably had they taken an active interest in the great public question
of Liberty. Then they would have had a spring of life in their own
hearts; then they would have suffered for a cause for which it is worth
any man's while to suffer, and die any death that a relentless power
might inflict.

I know that it is a very wise injunction, that every man should mind his
own business; and that, if every man would only do that, the world would
go on as well as heart could wish. I believe this, firmly. But then,
since, in the very constitution of things, every man's 'own business' is
inextricably interwoven with every other man's 'own business,' who shall
draw the line? Who shall define the circle and the sphere of the private
individual? Has not our Creator defined it already in our very being,
inasmuch as, by the indestructible ties of human sympathy and a common
nature, he has bound up the life, the interests, the business of the
individual, with the life, the interests, the business of the whole? By
his very nature, then, is it not every man's own business to know what
the world is busy about, and to take an interest in the world's affairs,
because they are his own? Is it not a truth written in the constitution
of every individual man, the well-known declaration of the Roman slave:
'I am a man, and I hold nothing human foreign to me?' And does not our
common Christianity teach over and over again in a thousand ways, that
we are all members one of another, and that no man lives for himself?
And is there any one fact, which the progress of events is now making,
more manifest than the oneness of all mankind? Why, my hearers, it is
because this simple and indestructible fact is not seen; because
individuals are for ever trying to live, and work, and enjoy, not with
and for, but at the expense of, their fellow-men, that things are so
continually getting out of joint, and the world is so full of uproar and
misery. My brothers, we are all One; and if we are resolved to min