“Not for my sake,” she cried, mounting a wagon in which crude metal had been brought to the forges, where she stood like some Roman matron in a victorious car, “not for my sake, nor for the redemption of one man do I urge you forward——” Here the impassioned orator was interrupted by shouts from the women, and wilder demonstrations from the men, who paused in their work to listen, and snatch a mouthful of bread from the hands of such women as were giving food to the hungry, that no man’s strength need fail till his work was done. “Let no man stop his work that my voice may be heard,” continued Madame Gosner. “God will give strength to my lungs, and you shall hear me, though ten thousand anvils rang out such glorious music as this at a single crash. In this sound I hear the downfall of that odious prison, where kings deal with their victims like incarnate demons, chaining them to walls like beasts of the fields—burying them alive in eternal darkness—rendering them up to worms and reptiles while yet alive. “Citizens, this is not the work of one generation, but of many. Kings and Queens of France have, for generations, held those accursed ramparts of stones as a monument of their greatness, dear to royalty as the throne itself. It is an awful contrast which makes the luxury of their palaces more perfect. Without misery for the people, courts and kings would never feel how much they are above us. In order to know how high they are, it is their eternal effort to debase us. We are the beasts of burden that drag forward their triumphal chariots; creatures to starve while they riot. By our labor they are fed; by our toil they are exalted, till pride becomes arrogance, and their very laws are made to protect them and degrade us. “The wealth of a nation lies in its labor. Where has that gone which our forefathers created by the strength of their hands? Look for it in the enormous estates which cover France from border to shore. Has one of them descended to the laborers, whose toil wrested them from the wilderness? Who among you owns a rood of land? Not one. If to you belongs the sledges you wield, and the spades with which you dig, it is all that they will give you out of a thousand years of hard toil, rendered with reckless generosity to these pampered lordlings. What are these creatures, after all, but things of our own creation? Their palaces, their estates, their jewels belong to us, and are made the instruments of our debasement. It has taken a thousand years to consolidate the power that crushes us. Men and women of France, let us unite, and a single year shall tear it down.