THE POLICY OF RICHELIEU.

By C. F. WISHART, of Monmouth College, Illinois.

BIOGRAPHICAL.

C. F. Wishart is a Buckeye by birth, having been born in Ontario, Ohio, September 3, 1870. After attending common school, he entered upon a business life at the age of sixteen, in a book-store in Monmouth, Illinois, where he remained three years. Entering the junior preparatory department in Monmouth College, he faithfully pursued his course, graduating in 1894. In the fall of that year he entered Allegheny Theological Seminary, from which he was graduated in the spring of 1897. Rev. Mr. Wishart organized a new mission in Allegheny, Pa., which has since grown into the Eleventh United Presbyterian Church, Termon avenue, and of which he is still the popular pastor. Mr. Wishart is an eloquent speaker, and during his college course captured most of the first prizes in that line, as follows: Spring of 1890, second prize Philo declamation contest; 1891, first prize Philo oratorical contest; 1892, first prize Inter-Collegiate Prohibition contest at Decatur, Illinois; 1893, first prize Monmouth local oratorical contest, at Galesburg, Ill; 1894, first prize Inter-State Oratorical Contest at Indianapolis, Ind.; 1897, first prize Purdy Scholarship Competition, covering a three-years course in Allegheny.

THE ORATION.

Delivered at the Inter-State Oratorical Contest at Indianapolis, Indiana, May 10, 1894, taking first prize. Judges: Pres. J. B. ANGELL, Prof. ORMONDE, Rev. H. A. CLEVELAND, D. D., Judge WOODS, Rev. Dr. HAYNES, and Ex-Gov. WM. MARMADUke.

Near the close of his memorable reign, Peter the Great stood one day by a lonely tomb in the city of Paris. He had viewed the institutions, studied the governments and judged the states

men of every court in Europe. An exponent of power, he came to worship at the shrine of power. Modern Russia did obeisance to modern France, as standing with uncovered head, the man of iron will and purpose bowed to a master spirit. "Great man!" said the monarch, "I would give one-half my kingdom if I could learn from thee to rule the other half." And from the standpoint of absolutism, the world confirms the judgment. For all history reveals no character so depraved and yet so majestic as that of the model of absolutists, the master spirit of two centuries of French polity, the man "fitted to rule chaos"-Cardinal Richelieu.

Entering the vicious politics of the court of Louis XIII., he found a nation incapable of selfrule. Facing the alternatives of absolutism or national disintegration, he chose the former. Obsequious to strength, tyrannical to weakness, a Jesuit in intrigue, a Robespierre in cruelty, a Napoleon in indomitable will and purpose, over broken oaths and treacherous alliances he climbed his way to fame and power. He held them in the face of a capricious king and a hostile court by his sleepless cunning, and the relentless punishment of his presumptuous rivals. Between the kings and absolute power stood three barriers-the nobles, the parliaments, and the Huguenots. All were met and crushed by Richelieu. Before his iron scepter disorder fled affrighted. Beneath his magic touch the Golden Lilies blossomed forth

on every plain and hilltop. The Chaos Ruler found France a collection of petty principalities; he left it a strongly centralized and powerful nation.

Nearly two centuries passed away. Richelieu's policy, carried to its legitimate conclusion by his apt pupil, Mazarin, had struck the keynote of French absolutism. Over the long, terrible nightmare of Bourbon misrule the Cardinal's mighty spirit hovered like a phantom. He had checked disintegration, but he had also checked the natural expansion of individual rights; he had chained Liberty and set the Bourbon dynasty to watch her dungeon cell; he had crossed purposes with the great economy of God. Behold then a strange anomaly! A government growing more despotic in the face of free thought,-a despotism "tempered by epigrams!" Absolutism with enslaved thought and a shackled press made Russia. Free government with free thought made America. But absolutism with free thought, free speech and a free press made the French Revolution, What a strange, sad spectacle! Voltaire and Rousseau dreaming of fraternal Utopias, a nation's bosom heaving with the new-born sacred thought of liberty,-yet all the while the clanking chain grown heavier and the cruel lash of tyranny plied more fiercely over the backs of bleeding millions. While French philosophy discussed ideal government, and French statesmen erected visionary schemes of finance, gaunt famine stared the

nation in the face, and the Bourbons wrung the last penny from the peasants' store to deck with golden lilies the glittering bowers and palaces of gay Versailles,-aye, to circle a lewd harlot's brow with gleaming gems and golden coronets. With every new régime the power of king and court increased. "The state," cries haughty Louis, "I am the state." Ah, proud Richelieu, with thy dreams of absolute power, of universal empire, and a world subservient to a cardinal's beck and call, didst thou e'er dream of this? Didst thou wear out that mighty life of thine in plots and schemes and projects universal, that this base Bourbon should through thy plans proclaim himself "the state"? Ill fared it for thy Bourbon brood when Liberty took up the challenge, and with fire and carnage taught all tyrants that the people are "the state."

While the great Cardinal lived, he mastered his system and repressed its evils. But his death, like that of Mirabeau, unchained the mischief of which he had been at once the author and the restraining power. The victor march of the seventeenth century became the funeral dirge of the eighteenth. Richelieu invoked the specter of aggressive absolutism, and it would not down; no hand was strong enough to conjure with the dead man's wand. Could such a system, false in principle and fatal in results,-have been a necessity in the evolution of modern Europe? Did the logic of the times demand absolutism for France?