Standard Selections: A Collection and Adaptation of Superior Productions from Best Authors for Use in Class Room and on the Platform
General
Standard Selections: A Collection and Adaptation of Superior Productions from Best Authors for Use in Class Room and on the Platform
Recitations
Holland lent sixty ships. England promised by special message to be
neutral; and you know neutrality means sneering at freedom, and sending
arms to tyrants. England promised neutrality, and the black looked out
and saw the whole civilized world marshaled against him. America, full
of slaves, was of course hostile. Only the Yankee sold him poor muskets
at a very high price. Mounting his horse, and riding to the eastern end
of the island, he looked out on a sight such as no native had ever seen
before. Sixty ships of the line, crowded by the best soldiers of Europe,
rounded the point. They were soldiers who had never yet met an equal,
whose tread, like Caesar's, had shaken Europe: soldiers who had scaled
the Pyramids, and planted the French banners on the walls of Rome. He
looked a moment, counted the flotilla, let the reins fall on the neck of
his horse, and turning to Christophe, exclaimed: "All France is come to
Hayti; they can only come to make us slaves; and we are lost!"
Toussaint was too dangerous to be left at large. So they summoned him to
attend a council; he went, and the moment he entered the room the
officers drew their swords and told him he was a prisoner. They put him
on shipboard and weighed anchor for France. As the island faded from his
sight he turned to the captain and said, "You think you have rooted up
the tree of liberty, but I am only a branch; I have planted the tree so
deep that all France can never root it up."
He was sent to a dungeon twelve feet by twenty, built wholly of stone,
with a narrow window, high up on one side, looking out on the snows of
Switzerland. In this living tomb the child of the sunny tropics was left
to die. But he did not die fast enough. Napoleon ordered the commandant
to go into Switzerland, to carry the keys of the dungeon with him and
stay four days. When he returned, Toussaint was found starved to death.
Napoleon, that imperial assassin, was taken, twelve years later, to his
prison at St. Helena, planned for a tomb, as he had planned that of
Toussaint, and there he whined away his dying hours in pitiful
complaints. God grant that when some future Plutarch shall weigh the
great men of our epoch, he do not put that whining child of St. Helena
into one scale, and into the other the negro, meeting death like a
Roman, without a murmur, in the solitude of his icy dungeon.
FOOTNOTE:
[40] By permission of the publishers, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.
THE DEDICATION OF GETTYSBURG CEMETERY
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this
continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a
great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived
and so dedicated, can long endure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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