The Project Gutenberg EBook of Belford's Magazine, Volume II, No. 8,
January, 1889, by Various

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Title: Belford's Magazine, Volume II, No. 8, January, 1889

Author: Various

Release Date: March 18, 2010 [EBook #31684]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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BELFORD'S MAGAZINE.

Vol. II. No. 8.
January, 1889.

WICKED LEGISLATION.

The patience with which mankind submits to the demands of tyrants
has been the wonder of each succeeding age, and heroes are made of
those who break one yoke only to bow with servility to a greater. The
Roman soldier, returning from wars in which his valor had won wealth
and empire for his rulers, was easily content to become first a
tenant, and then a serf, upon the very lands he had tilled as owner
before his voluntary exile as his country's defender, kissing the hand
that oppressed, so long as it dispensed, as charity, a portion of his
tithes and rentals in sports and food. And now, after ages of
wonder and criticism, the soldiers of our nineteenth-century
civilization outvie their Roman prototypes in submitting to exactions
and injustice of which Nero was incapable either of imagining or
executing, bowing subserviently to the more ingenious tyrant of an
advanced civilization, if but his hand drop farthings of pensions in
return for talents of extortion. It may not be that the soldiers
and citizens of America shall become so thoroughly debauched and
degraded, nor that the consequences of their revolt shall be a
burning capitol and a terrified monopolist; but if these evils are
to be averted, it will be only because fearless hands tear the
mask from our modern Neros, and tireless arms hold up to popular
view the naked picture of national disgrace.

Twenty-eight years ago the first step had been taken towards the final
overthrow of the objective form of human slavery. There were, even in
those days, cranks who were dreaming of new harmonies in the songs of
liberty; and when tyranny opposed force to the