The coldly
ordered massacres of selected victims in political and spiritual struggles
rise in a different order of feelings, and are remembered through all ages
with indignation and shame. The victims perish as the champions of
principles which survive through the changes of time. They are marked for
the sacrifice on account of their advocacy of a cause which to half
mankind is the cause of humanity. They are the martyrs of history, and the
record of atrocity rises again in immortal witness against the opinions
out of which it rose.
Patricians and plebeians, aristocrats and democrats, have alike stained
their hands with blood in the working out of the problem of politics. But
impartial history declares also that the crimes of the popular party have
in all ages been the lighter in degree, while in themselves they have more
to excuse them; and if the violent acts of revolutionists have been held
up more conspicuously for condemnation, it has been only because the fate
of noblemen and gentlemen has been more impressive to the imagination than
the fate of the peasant or the artisan. But the endurance of the
inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society. When the
people complain, said Mirabeau, the people are always right. The popular
cause has been the cause of the laborer struggling for a right to live and
breathe and think as a man.
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