pride,
and yet you shudder because in one night are to be ended forever the
mental tortures of many helots, because a vitiated and paralytic people
has to die to give place to another, young, active, full of energy!

"What is death? Nothingness, or a dream? Can its specters be compared
to the reality of the agonies of a whole miserable generation? The
needful thing is to destroy the evil, to kill the dragon and
bathe the new people in the blood, in order to make it strong and
invulnerable. What else is the inexorable law of Nature, the law of
strife in which the weak has to succumb so that the vitiated species
be not perpetuated and creation thus travel backwards? Away then with
effeminate scruples! Fulfill the eternal laws, foster them, and then
the earth will be so much the more fecund the more it is fertilized
with blood, and the thrones the more solid the more they rest upon
crimes and corpses. Let there be no hesitation, no doubtings! What is
the pain of death? A momentary sensation, perhaps confused, perhaps
agreeable, like the transition from waking to sleep. What is it that
is being destroyed? Evil, suffering--feeble weeds, in order to set in
their place luxuriant plants. Do you call that destruction? I should
call it creating, producing, nourishing, vivifying!"

Such bloody sophisms, uttered with conviction and coolness, overwhelmed
the youth, weakened as he was by more than three months in prison
and blinded by his passion for revenge, so he was not in a mood to
analyze the moral basis of the matter. Instead of replying that the
worst and cowardliest of men is always something more than a plant,
because he has a soul and an intelligence, which, however vitiated
and brutalized they may be, can be redeemed; instead of replying that
man has no right to dispose of one life for the benefit of another,
that the right to life is inherent in every individual like the right
to liberty and to light; instead of replying that if it is an abuse on
the part of governments to punish in a culprit the faults and crimes
to which they have driven him by their own negligence or stupidity,
how much more so would it be in a man, however great and however
unfortunate he might be, to punish in a wretched people the faults of
its governments and its ancestors; instead of declaring that God alone
can use such methods, that God can destroy because He can create,
God who holds in His hands recompense, eternity, and the future,
to just