ose whose intelligence goes to create a
commanding public opinion, then you would soon find your private
interests, the comfort and lives of individuals, threatened and
assailed. If your public affairs, as they are directed in your Public
Councils, were uncontrolled by the sentiments of private men, they would
soon be coming down into our streets and into our private dwellings with
a most disastrous influence. They would make their appearance in the
shape of armed men. They would be heard in the rattle of musketry and
the roar of cannon; and the door-posts of the humblest and of the
richest homes of the people might be spattered with the blood of
inoffensive men, women, and children,--of the very persons who maintain
that they have nothing to do with public matters.

Already, well off as we may be in comparison with other nations, have
not our public concerns, through the criminal neglect and insensibility
of the people, taken such a direction as, if it does not put us in peril
of having our blood spilt in the streets, yet endangers the sacred
rights of Free Thought and Free Speech, and makes it hazardous to
property and to personal liberty to obey the plainest dictates of
humanity? There are things, as I have already intimated, which ought to
be dearer to us than life, which may be exposed to suffer loss; and
which are exposed to harm at this very hour by the bad administration of
our public concerns.

No doubt, these quiet people who have been so savagely butchered in the
streets of Paris, little dreamed, when they left their homes that day,
that they would be shot down as the enemies of the Government. They had
nothing to do with the Government. They had no thought of crossing its
path. They were pursuing the even tenor of their own quiet way. They
desired only to mind their own business. And yet, had they been taking
the most active interest in public affairs, they could not possibly have
come to so miserable an end, as I will presently show.

The simple, religious truth is, and the sooner every man accepts it,
and makes up his mind and his life to it, the better for him, for our
country, and for the world--the plain truth is, that '_no man liveth or
can live to himself_'--that the interests, the highest interests, the
personal character and salvation, the very life of the individual, in
the most obvious and in the profoundest sense of the word, life, is
wrapt up with the interests of the whole; in other words, wi