Mosses from an old manse
flames, and assume the garb, together with the manners, duties,
offices, and responsibilities, of the opposite sex.
What favor was accorded to this scheme I am unable to say, my attention
being suddenly drawn to a poor, deceived, and half-delirious girl, who,
exclaiming that she was the most worthless thing alive or dead,
attempted to cast herself into the fire amid all that wrecked and
broken trumpery of the world. A good man, however, ran to her rescue.
“Patience, my poor girl!” said he, as he drew her back from the fierce
embrace of the destroying angel. “Be patient, and abide Heaven’s will.
So long as you possess a living soul, all may be restored to its first
freshness. These things of matter and creations of human fantasy are
fit for nothing but to be burned when once they have had their day; but
your day is eternity!”
“Yes,” said the wretched girl, whose frenzy seemed now to have sunk
down into deep despondency, “yes, and the sunshine is blotted out of
it!”
It was now rumored among the spectators that all the weapons and
munitions of war were to be thrown into the bonfire with the exception
of the world’s stock of gunpowder, which, as the safest mode of
disposing of it, had already been drowned in the sea. This intelligence
seemed to awaken great diversity of opinion. The hopeful philanthropist
esteemed it a token that the millennium was already come; while persons
of another stamp, in whose view mankind was a breed of bulldogs,
prophesied that all the old stoutness, fervor, nobleness, generosity,
and magnanimity of the race would disappear,—these qualities, as they
affirmed, requiring blood for their nourishment. They comforted
themselves, however, in the belief that the proposed abolition of war
was impracticable for any length of time together.
Be that as it might, numberless great guns, whose thunder had long been
the voice of battle,—the artillery of the Armada, the battering trains
of Marlborough, and the adverse cannon of Napoleon and Wellington,—were
trundled into the midst of the fire. By the continual addition of dry
combustibles, it had now waxed so intense that neither brass nor iron
could withstand it. It was wonderful to behold how these terrible
instruments of slaughter melted away like playthings of wax. Then the
armies of the earth wheeled around the mighty furnace, with their
military music playing triumphant marches,—and flung in their muskets
and swords. The standard-bearers, likewise, cast one look upward at
their banners, all tattered with shot-holes and inscribed with the
names of victorious fields; and, giving them a last flourish on the
breeze, they lowered them into the flame, which snatched them upward in
its rush towards the clouds. This ceremony being over, the world was
left without a single weapon in its hands, except possibly a few old
king’s arms and rusty swords and other trophies of the Revolution in
some of our State armories. And now the drums were beaten and the
trumpets brayed all together, as a prelude to the proclamation of
universal and eternal peace and the announcement that glory was no
longer to be won by blood, but that it would henceforth be the
contention of the human race to work out the greatest mutual good, and
that beneficence, in the future annals of the earth, would claim the
praise of valor. The blessed tidings were accordingly promulgated, and
caused infinite rejoicings among those who had stood aghast at the
horror and absurdity of war.
But I saw a grim smile pass over the seared visage of a stately old
commander,—by his war-worn figure and rich military dress, he might
have been one of Napoleon’s famous marshals,—who, with the rest of the
world’s soldiery, had just flung away the sword that had been familiar
to his right hand for half a century.
“Ay! ay!” grumbled he. “Let them proclaim what they please; but, in the
end, we shall find that all this foolery has only made more work for
the armorers and cannon-founders.”
“Why, sir,” exclaimed I, in astonishment, “do you imagine that the
human race will ever so far return on the steps of its past madness as
to weld another sword or cast another cannon?”
“There will be no need,” observed, with a sneer, one who neither felt
benevolence nor had faith in it. “When Cain wished to slay his brother,
he was at no loss for a weapon.”
“We shall see,” replied the veteran commander. “If I am mistaken, so
much the better; but in my opinion, without pretending to philosophize
about the matter, the necessity of war lies far deeper than these
honest gentlemen suppose. What! is there a field for all the petty
disputes of individuals? and shall there be no great law court for the
settlement of national difficulties? The battle-field is the only court
where such suits can be tried.”
“You forget, general,” rejoined I, “that, in this advanced stage of
civilization, Reason and Philanthropy combined will constitute just
such a tribunal as is requisite.”
“Ah, I had forgotten that, indeed!” said the old warrior, as he limped
away.
The fire was now to be replenished with materials that had hitherto
been considered of even greater importance to the well-being of society
than the warlike munitions which we had already seen consumed. A body
of reformers had travelled all over the earth in quest of the machinery
by which the different nations were accustomed to inflict the
punishment of death. A shudder passed through the multitude as these
ghastly emblems were dragged forward. Even the flames seemed at first
to shrink away, displaying the shape and murderous contrivance of each
in a full blaze of light, which of itself was sufficient to convince
mankind of the long and deadly error of human law. Those old implements
of cruelty; those horrible monsters of mechanism; those inventions
which it seemed to demand something worse than man’s natural heart to
contrive, and which had lurked in the dusky nooks of ancient prisons,
the subject of terror-stricken legend,—were now brought forth to view.
Headsmen’s axes, with the rust of noble and royal blood upon them, and
a vast collection of halters that had choked the breath of plebeian
victims, were thrown in together. A shout greeted the arrival of the
guillotine, which was thrust forward on the same wheels that had borne
it from one to another of the bloodstained streets of Paris. But the
loudest roar of applause went up, telling the distant sky of the
triumph of the earth’s redemption, when the gallows made its
appearance. An ill-looking fellow, however, rushed forward, and,
putting himself in the path of the reformers, bellowed hoarsely, and
fought with brute fury to stay their progress.
It was little matter of surprise, perhaps, that the executioner should
thus do his best to vindicate and uphold the machinery by which he
himself had his livelihood and worthier individuals their death; but it
deserved special note that men of a far different sphere—even of that
consecrated class in whose guardianship the world is apt to trust its
benevolence—were found to take the hangman’s view of the question.
“Stay, my brethren!” cried one of them. “You are misled by a false
philanthropy; you know not what you do. The gallows is a
Heaven-ordained instrument. Bear it back, then, reverently, and set it
up in its old place, else the world will fall to speedy ruin and
desolation!”
“Onward! onward!” shouted a leader in the reform. “Into the flames with
the accursed instrument of man’s bloody policy! How can human law
inculcate benevolence and love while it persists in setting up the
gallows as its chief symbol? One heave more, good friends, and the
world will be redeemed from its greatest error.”
A thousand hands, that nevertheless loathed the touch, now lent their
assistance, and thrust the ominous burden far, far into the centre of
the raging furnace. There its fatal and abhorred image was beheld,
first black, then a red coal, then ashes.
“That was well done!” exclaimed I.
“Yes, it was well done,” replied, but with less enthusiasm than I
expected, the thoughtful observer, who was still at my side,—“well
done, if the world be good enough for the measure. Death, however, is
an idea that cannot easily be dispensed with in any condition between
the primal innocence and that other purity and perfection which
perchance we are destined to attain after travelling round the full
circle; but, at all events, it is well that the experiment should now
be tried.”
“Too cold! too cold!” impatiently exclaimed the young and ardent leader
in this triumph. “Let the heart have its voice here as well as the
intellect. And as for ripeness, and as for progress, let mankind always
do the highest, kindest, noblest thing that, at any given period, it
has attained the perception of; and surely that thing cannot be wrong
nor wrongly timed.”
I know not whether it were the excitement of the scene, or whether the
good people around the bonfire were really growing more enlightened
every instant; but they now proceeded to measures in the full length of
which I was hardly prepared to keep them company. For instance, some
threw their marriage certificates into the flames, and declared
themselves candidates for a higher, holier, and more comprehensive
union than that which had subsisted from the birth of time under the
form of the connubial tie. Others hastened to the vaults of banks and
to the coffers of the rich—all of which were opened to the first comer
on this fated occasion—and brought entire bales of paper-money to
enliven the blaze, and tons of coin to be melted down by its intensity.
Henceforth, they said, universal benevolence, uncoined and exhaustless,
was to be the golden currency of the world. At this intelligence the
bankers and speculators in the stocks grew pale, and a pickpocket, who
had reaped a rich harvest among the crowd, fell down in a deadly
fainting fit. A few men of business burned their day-books and ledgers,
the notes and obligations of their creditors, and all other evidences
of debts due to themselves; while perhaps a somewhat larger number
satisfied their zeal for reform with the sacrifice of any uncomfortable
recollection of their own indebtment. There was then a cry that the
period was arrived when the title-deeds of landed property should be
given to the flames, and the whole soil of the earth revert to the
public, from whom it had been wrongfully abstracted and most unequally
distributed among individuals. Another party demanded that all written
constitutions, set forms of government, legislative acts,
statute-books, and everything else on which human invention had
endeavored to stamp its arbitrary laws, should at once be destroyed,
leaving the consummated world as free as the man first created.
Whether any ultimate action was taken with regard to these propositions
is beyond my knowledge; for, just then, some matters were in progress
that concerned my sympathies more nearly.
“See! see! What heaps of books and pamphlets!” cried a fellow, who did
not seem to be a lover of literature. “Now we shall have a glorious
blaze!”
“That’s just the thing!” said a modern philosopher. “Now we shall get
rid of the weight of dead men’s thought, which has hitherto pressed so
heavily on the living intellect that it has been incompetent to any
effectual self-exertion. Well done, my lads! Into the fire with them!
Now you are enlightening the world indeed!”
“But what is to become of the trade?” cried a frantic bookseller.
“O, by all means, let them accompany their merchandise,” coolly
observed an author. “It will be a noble funeral-pile!”
The truth was, that the human race had now reached a stage of progress
so far beyond what the wisest and wittiest men of former ages had ever
dreamed of, that it would have been a manifest absurdity to allow the