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Updated: June 24, 2025
A shrewd, if prejudiced, observer, Bishop Burnet, brands the English clergy of his day as the most lifeless in Europe, "the most remiss of their labours in private and the least severe of their lives." A large number of prelates were mere Whig partizans with no higher aim than that of promotion. The levées of the Ministers were crowded with lawn sleeves.
As for the Church, it was founded on acts of Parliament, it was endowed and established by the State, its head was the sovereign, its clergy were civil servants who went to levees and hung on the edge of drawing-rooms and troubled the knocker of No. 10 Downing-Street.
The ceremony of the dinners and levees and the liveried servants were favorite impeachments of the President among the early Democrats before they had better material, and Washington was charged with trying to constitute a court, and with conducting himself like a king.
The levees by this time had become so extended as to afford almost entire immunity against the floods of annual occurrence. The culture of sugar received a new impetus and began rapidly to increase, and capital came flowing in.
In Missouri the levees protecting Davis Island, the home of Jefferson Davis, have given way, and the island is submerged. Davis Island was densely populated, as about twenty-five hundred people lived on it. Help had to be sent for, and steamers and barges came down and rescued the people and the cattle.
There are the solitary huts of the woodcutters, and bars of sand covered with cane brake, and impenetrable forests, and the forbidding depths of the jungle. Farther on there are the sugar plantations, and the levees, and the great houses of the planters, and the huts of the negroes, and the vivid greens of fields of sugar cane standing many feet high; and around these the cypress swamp.
In the Tuileries and in St. Cloud there were reception-days, audience-days, and great and small levees, at which were assembled all that France possessed of rank, name, and fame, and where the ambassadors of all the powers accredited at the court of the consul, where all the higher clergy and the pope's nuncio, appeared in full dress.
The salaries allowed to public officers, though so low as not to afford a decent maintenance to those who resided at the seat of government, were declared to be so enormously high, as clearly to manifest a total disregard of that simplicity and economy which were the characteristics of republics. The levees of the President, and the evening parties of Mrs.
Another thing which surprises one is the animation visible throughout the country. On the levees along the canals and on those which traverse the inundated portions, there moves a mob of passers-by and of travellers. There is no road so frequented in France, even in the neighbourhood of a populous city.
Today, in the same kind of community effort, only very much larger, the United Nations and their peoples have kept the levees of civilization high enough to prevent the floods of aggression and barbarism and wholesale murder from engulfing us all. The flood has been raging for four years.
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