ways
challenges admiration, the secret being that it did not separate the
moral from the physical nature of man. Bain, Maudsley, Spencer, Haeckle,
Buckle, Draper, and all our leading sociologists base all their
arguments on the intimate relations that exist between the physical
surrounding and the physical condition of man and his morality. Churches
foolishly ignore all this.
From Constantinople the fashion or custom gradually invaded Italy; and
as Rome was the centre of the new religion, so it also became the centre
of music, and Rome and Naples were soon the home of the eunuch devoted
or immolated to the science of music. The eunuchs reached the height of
their renown in music, as well as what might be termed their golden era,
with the establishment of the Italian opera, in the seventeenth century.
At this period all the stages of Italy were the scenes of the lyric
triumphs of this otherwise unfortunate class, some of whom accumulated
vast fortunes. In the following century, as has been seen, Clement XVI
abolished the practice as far as the church was concerned, and in the
present century the first Napoleon abolished the practice secularly and
socially. Mankind cannot sufficiently appreciate the benefits it
received from the results of the French Revolution; we are too apt to
look at that event simply from the unavoidable means which an uneducated
class--rendered desperate by long suffering and brutalization under an
organized system of oppressive misrule--had adopted to remedy existing
evils. After the dissolution of the Directory France cannot be said to
have been in a state of anarchy, and the long and bloody wars with which
Napoleon is usually blamed should rather be charged to that government
and imbecile ministerial policy that lost to England the American
colonies. The series of battles from Marengo to Waterloo are as much the
creation of the cabinet of George III as those from Concord to Yorktown.
Waterloo involved more than the simple defeat of Napoleon; it meant the
defeat of moral and intellectual progress, as well as the suppression of
the rights of man. The suppression of the Inquisition in Spain, and of
eunuchism in Italy; the Code Napoleon; the Imperial highways of France;
the construction of its harbors,--notably that of Havre; and the
political and social emancipation of the Jews in France, Italy, and
Germany are monuments to this great man that have not their equals to
crown the acts of any other Fr
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