What rays of intellectual light, what flashes of genuine eloquence, burst forth during the tempestuous times of this period to illumine their progress or define the glory of their future? When the minds and imaginations of men are moved in civil war, they betray, in spite of themselves, the nobility or meanness of their cause. Even the ignorant, says Quintilian, when moved by the violent passions, do not seek for what they are to say. It is the soul alone that renders them eloquent. Only the hoarse clamors for revenge, or the hollow laugh against the remonstrance of humanity, do we hear from their tribunals and halls of legislation. Fatuity possessed their minds, and rather than not succeed in their designs, the leaders would have preferred a dreary solitude to the best interests of humanity, or, like Erostratus, they would have rather burned down the temple of liberty itself. "Pejus deteriusque tyrannide sive injusto imperio, bellum civile." VIII. Civil liberty is again triumphant, but at what a sacrifice of human life! What a deluge of blood has been poured over nature's fields, where the contending armies have struggled together! A half a million of lives have been yielded up in this the nation's sacrifice. "The tree of Liberty," said Barere, "is best watered with the blood of tyrants;" but how few among this immense host of victims were the originators of the sedition! The merciless schemers of bloody and cruel wars rarely expose their precious lives to the chances of combat. During the existence of the slave system, and the long period of its progress, what has it produced to enrich the heritage of the human mind? Where are the holy and pure traditions, the bright recollections? Neither wisdom nor philosophy has appeared, nor those arts which serve to form the "happy genius of nations." There are countries where the march of ideas is accelerated only by the force of selfish passions; and philanthropy, that true index of civilization, only appears when it is required by mercantilism or political ambition. The aims and influences of commercial and political life can debase and destroy the noblest impulses. "It is a grand and beautiful spectacle," exclaims the eloquent Rousseau, "to see man issue forth out of nothingness, as it were, by his own proper efforts, to dissipate, by the light of his reason, the shadows in which nature had enveloped him, to elevate himself even above himself, to glance with his spirit even into the celestial regions, to pass, with the stride of a giant, even as the sun, through the vast expanse of the universe, and what is still greater and more difficult, to enter one's self, and study there man, and to understand his nature, his duties, and his end." IX.