us called the sixteenth
century "the excrement of the ages," _fex temporum_. Bossuet thus
qualified the seventeenth century: "A wicked and paltry age." Rousseau
branded the eighteenth century, in these terms: "This great rottenness
amidst which we live." Posterity has proved these illustrious men in
the wrong. It has said to Erasmus: "The sixteenth century was great;"
it has said to Bossuet: "The seventeenth century was great;" it has
said to Rousseau: "The eighteenth century was great."

Even had the infamy of those ages been actual, those great men would
have been wrong to complain. The man who thinks should accept simply
and calmly the surroundings in which Providence has placed him. The
splendour of human intelligence, the loftiness of genius, shine no less
by contrast than by harmony with the age. The stoic and profound
philosopher is not diminished by an external debasement. Virgil,
Petrarch, Racine are great in their purple; Job is still greater on his
dunghill.

But we can say, we men of the nineteenth century, that the nineteenth
century is not the dunghill. However deep the shame of the present,
whatever blows we receive from the fluctuation of events, whatever the
apparent desertion or the momentary lethargy of mental vigour, none of
us, democrats, will repudiate the magnificent epoch in which we live,
the virile age of mankind.

Let us proclaim it aloud, let us proclaim it in our fall and in our
defeat, this is the greatest of all ages! and do you know the reason
why? because it is the mildest. This age, the immediate issue, the
firstborn offspring, of the French Revolution, frees the slave in
America, raises from his degradation the _pariah_ in Asia, abolishes
the suttee in India, and extinguishes in Europe the last brands of the
stake, civilizes Turkey, carries the Gospel into the domain of the
Koran, dignifies woman, subordinates the right of the strongest to that
of the most just, suppresses pirates, mitigates sentences, makes the
galleys healthy, throws the red-hot iron into the sewer, condemns the
penalty of death, removes the ball and chain from the leg of the
convict, abolishes torture, degrades and brands war, stifles Dukes of
Alva and Charles the Ninths, and extracts the claws of tyrants.

This age proclaims the sovereignty of the citizen, and the
inviolability of life; it crowns the people, and consecrates man.

In art, it possesses all varieties of genius,--writers, orators, poets,
historia