hat its leaders should be the object of so much
calumny?

It is time that these calumnies should cease. It matters little
to us, who act as our conscience dictates, without troubling
ourselves as to the personal result; and to whom faith and
exile have given the habit of looking higher than the praise or
blame of this earth. But it should be recognized as most
important by all who believe that political questions agitated
by whole nations, are questions eminently religious. For
religion, to all those who see more in it than the mere
materialism of forms and formulae, is not only a thought of
heaven, but the impulse which seeks to apply that thought, as
far as possible to government on earth, our rule of action for
the good of all, and for the moral development of humanity.
Politics then are like religion--sacred; and all good men are
bound to see them morally respected. Every question has a right
to serious, calm, and honest discussion. Calumny should be the
weapon of those only who have to defend not ideas, but crimes.

It is immoral to say to men who have preached clemency
throughout the whole of their political career, who have
initiated their rule by the abolition of capital punishment,
who, when in power, never signed a single sentence of exile
against those who had persecuted them, nor even against the
known enemies of their principle.--"You are the sanguinary
organizers of _terror_, men of vengeance and of cruelty." It is
immoral to ascribe to them views which they never had, and to
choose to forget that they have, through the medium of the
press here and elsewhere, attracted and refuted those
communistic systems and exclusive solutions which tend to
suppress rather than to transform the elements of society; and
to say to them, "_You are communists, you desire to abolish
property_." It is immoral to accuse of irreligion and impiety
men who have devoted their whole lives to the endeavor to
reconcile the religious idea, betrayed and disinherited by the
very men who pretend to be its official defenders, with the
National movement. It is immoral to insinuate accusations of
personal interest and of pillage, against men who have serenely
endured the sufferings of poverty, and whose life, accessible
to all, has never betrayed eith