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Book, page 80 / 124 upon French merchant-ships, wherever they could be found. And the world was again deluged in war. France has recorded her past history and her present condition, in the regal palaces she has reared. Upon these monumental walls are inscribed, in letters more legible than the hieroglyphics of Egypt, and as ineffaceable, the long and dreary story of kingly vice, voluptuousness and pride, and of popular servility and oppression. The unthinking tourist saunters through these magnificent saloons, upon which have been lavished the wealth of princes and the toil of ages, and admires their gorgeous grandeur. In marbled floors and gilded ceilings and damask tapestry, and all the appliances of boundless luxury and opulence, he sees but the triumphs of art, and bewildered by the dazzling spectacle, forgets the burning outrage upon human rights which it proclaims. Half-entranced, he wanders through uncounted acres of groves and lawns, and parterres of flowers, embellished with lakes, fountains, cascades, and the most voluptuous statuary, where kings and queens have reveled, and he reflects not upon the millions who have toiled, from dewy morn till the shades of night, through long and joyless years, eating black bread, clothed in coarse raiment--the man, the woman, the ox, companions in toil, companions in thought--to minister to this indulgence. But the palaces of France proclaim, in trumpet tones, the shame of France. They say to her kings. Behold the undeniable monuments of your pride, your insatiate extortion, your measureless extravagance and luxury. They say to the people, Behold the proofs of the outrages which your fathers, for countless ages, have endured. They lived in mud hovels that their licentious kings might riot haughtily in the apartments, canopied with gold, of Versailles, the Tuileries, and St. Cloud--the Palaces of France. The mind of the political economist lingers painfully upon them. They are gorgeous as specimens of art. They are sacred as memorials of the past. Vandalism alone would raze them to their foundations. Still, the judgment says, It would be better for the political regeneration of France, if, like the Bastile, their very foundations were plowed up, and sown with salt. For they are a perpetual provocative to every thinking man. They excite unceasingly democratic rage against aristocratic arrogance. Thousands of noble women, as they traverse those gorgeous halls, feel those fires of indignation glowing in their souls, which glowed in the bosom of Madame Roland. Thousands
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