"Despite yourself, still you doubt, Sacrovir? I can understand it. Fortunately, the _lessons_, the _proofs_, the _data_, the _facts_, the _names_, that you are about to be made acquainted with in the mysterious chamber, will go further to convince you than any words of mine. When you will see, my friends, that in the gloomiest days of our history--such days as the Kings, the seigneurs and the clergy have almost always afflicted man with; when you will see that we, the conquered, started with slavery and arrived step by step to popular sovereignty; you will then ask yourselves whether, at this hour, when we find ourselves invested with that so painfully earned sovereignty, it would not be criminal on our part to mistrust the future. To mistrust it! Great God! Oh! Our fathers, despite all their martyrdom never did mistrust the future! There was hardly a century when they failed to take a step towards deliverance! Alas, almost always that step was marked with blood! If our masters, the conquerors, showed themselves implacable, there hardly was a century when, as you will see, there were not frightful reprisals levied upon them to satisfy divine justice. Yes, you will see, there hardly was a century when the woolen cap did not rise against the casque of gold, when the peasant's scythe did not strike fire with the lance of the knight, when the horny hand of the vassal did not smite the delicately pampered hand of some episcopal petty tyrant! You will see it, my children--hardly a century when the infamous debauches and acts of rapine and ferocity indulged in by the Kings and most of the seigneurs and upper clergy failed to rouse the people, or when they failed to protest, arms in hand, against the tyranny of the throne, the nobility and the Popes! You will see it--hardly a century, when the famishing masses, rising as inexorable as hunger, failed to throw their lordlings into terror--hardly a century without its Belshazzar's feast, buried along with its golden drinking cups, its flowers, its songs and its displayful magnificence, under the avenging wave of some popular torrent. Undoubtedly, alas! the terrible, though legitimate, reprisals of the oppressed were succeeded by ferocious acts of revenge. Nevertheless, formidable examples had been made. At each recurring epoch the Revolution wrung from the hereditary oppressors of our fathers some lasting concession, registered in the law and necessarily observed." "I believe you," said Sacrovir. "Judging the past by the present, in 1789 the Revolution conquered our freedom; in 1830 the Revolution returned to us a part of our rights; finally, last year, in 1848, the Revolution proclaimed the sovereignty of the people and universal suffrage, which is calculated to put an end to bloody fratricidal conflicts."