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In October, 1825, there appeared an advertisement for eight or ten Negro slaves with their families to form a community of this kind under the direction of an "Emancipating Labor Society" of the State of Kentucky. In the same year Frances Wright suggested a school on a similar basis.
They formed a noble material on which every emancipating idea could work; men trained by persecutions to self-sacrifice and humble duties, making good soldiers, good farmers, good workmen in every department, honest and sturdy, patient and self-reliant, devoted to their families though not demonstrative of affection; keeping the Sunday as a day of worship rather than rest or recreation, cherishing as the dearest and most sacred of all privileges the right to worship God according to the dictates of conscience enlightened by the Bible, and willing to fight, even amid the greatest privations and sacrifices, to maintain this sacred right and transmit it to their children.
She posed, too, as a liberal-minded monarch, willing to discuss the advisability of giving Russia a written constitution, or of emancipating the serfs. Schools and academies were established, and French became the language of polite Russian society. At heart Catherine was little moved by desire for real reform or by pity for the peasants.
Hence, the policy of Metternich's home rule was fatal to all expansion, to all emancipating movements, to all progress, to everything which looked like popular liberty.
He was an unsuccessful reformer, and yet he prepared the way for that religious revival which afterward took place in the Catholic Church itself. His spirit was not revolutionary, like that of the Saxon monk, and yet it was progressive. His soul was in active sympathy with every emancipating idea of his age.
The same want of kindling power in the national intelligence which made of the English Reformation one of the most sluggish and tedious chapters in our history, has made the still mightier advance of the moderns from the social system and spiritual bases of the old state, in spite of our two national achievements of punishing a king with death and emancipating our slaves, just as unimpressive and semi-efficacious a performance in this country, as the more affrontingly hollow and halt-footed transactions of the sixteenth century.
It is because the mere possibility of emancipating ourselves from the impediments of nature is in itself a satisfaction that flatters our thirst for freedom. This is the reason why moral judgment, on the contrary, makes us experience a feeling of constraint that humbles us.
It is not easy for a proud people to stomach insults such as, for instance, the remark in the Toronto News, that the English-Canadians would find some way of "emancipating themselves from the dominance of an inferior people whom peculiar circumstances had placed in authority in the Dominion."
Yet were certain limitations still imposed on him by the very army to which he owed his immense authority. That singular body of men was, for the most part, composed of zealous republicans. In the act of enslaving their country, they had deceived themselves into the belief that they were emancipating her.
They detested the principles of the French Revolution, partly because those principles were godless, partly because they were emancipating.
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