g the first impulse. God's
truth is universal; it cannot be monopolized by selfishness.

THE TWO PROCESSIONS. (1844.)

"Look upon this picture, and on this." HAMLET.

CONSIDERING that we have a slave population of nearly three millions, and
that in one half of the states of the Republic it is more hazardous to
act upon the presumption that "all men are created free and equal" than
it would be in Austria or Russia, the lavish expression of sympathy and
extravagant jubilation with which, as a people, we are accustomed to
greet movements in favor of freedom abroad are not a little remarkable.
We almost went into ecstasies over the first French revolution; we filled
our papers with the speeches of orator Hunt and the English radicals; we
fraternized with the United Irishmen; we hailed as brothers in the cause
of freedom the very Mexicans whom we have since wasted with fire and
sword; our orators, North and South, grew eloquent and classic over the
Greek and Polish revolutions. In short, long ere this, if the walls of
kingcraft and despotism had been, like those of Jericho, destined to be
overthrown by sound, our Fourth of July cannon-shootings and bell-
ringings, together with our fierce, grandiloquent speech-makings in and
out of Congress, on the occasions referred to, would have left no stone
upon another.

It is true that an exception must be made in the case of Hayti. We fired
no guns, drank no toasts, made no speeches in favor of the establishment
of that new republic in our neighborhood. The very mention of the
possibility that Haytien delegates might ask admittance to the congress
of the free republics of the New World at Panama "frightened from their
propriety" the eager propagandists of republicanism in the Senate, and
gave a death-blow to their philanthropic projects. But as Hayti is a
republic of blacks who, having revolted from their masters as well as
from the mother country, have placed themselves entirely without the pale
of Anglo-Saxon sympathy by their impertinent interference with the
monopoly of white liberty, this exception by no means disproves the
general fact, that in the matter of powder-burning, bell-jangling,
speech-making, toast-drinking admiration of freedom afar off and in the
abstract we have no rivals. The caricature of our "general sympathizers"
in Martin Chuzzlewit is by no means a fancy sketch.

The news of the revolution of the three days in Paris, and the tr