and not to console itself in regard to a single life that
has been unjustly and odiously sacrificed; but it ought not to regret
its blood when it was shed to reveal eternal truths. God has put this
price on the germination and maturation of all His designs in regard
to man. Ideas vegetate in human blood; revolutions descend from the
scaffold. All religions become divine through martyrdom. Let us, then,
pardon each other, sons of combatants and victims. Let us become
reconciled over their graves to take up the work which they have left
undone. Crime has lost every thing in introducing itself into the
ranks of the republic. To do battle is not to immolate. Let us take
away the crime from the cause of the people, as a weapon which has
pierced their hands and changed liberty into despotism. Let us not
seek to justify the scaffold with the cause of our country, and
proscriptions by the cause of liberty. Let us not pardon the spirit of
our age by the sophism of revolutionary energy, let humanity preserve
its heart; it is the safest and most infallible of its principles, and
_let us resign ourselves to the condition of human things_. The
history of the Revolution is glorious and sad as the day after the
victory, or the eve of another combat. But if this history is full of
mourning, it is also full of faith. It resembles the antique drama
where, while the narrator recites his story, the chorus of the people
shouts the glory, weeps for the victims and raises a hymn of
consolation and hope to God."

All this is very beautiful, but it does not increase our stock of
historical information. It teaches the people resignation, instead of
pointing to their errors, and the errors of those who claimed to be
their deliverers. Lamartme has made an apotheosis of the Revolution,
instead of treating it as the unavoidable consequence of
misgovernment. To an English or American reader the allusion to "the
blood sacrifice," which is necessary in politics as in religion, would
border on impiety; with the French it is probably a proof of religious
faith. Lamartine, in his views and conceptions, in his mode of
thinking and philosophizing, is much more nearly allied to the German
than to the English schools; only that, instead of a philosophical
system, carried through with a rigorous and unsparing logic, he
indulges in philosophical reveries. As a statesman Lamartine lacks
speciality, and for this reason we think that his administration will
be a