n Order cannot palliate the massacre of its
Innocents.' True; but human nature being what it is, the unreasoning
burst of fury which strove to stamp out every trace of old institutions,
to exterminate the race of the unconscious oppressors, was less strange
than the fidelity of the Vendeans.

And yet that massacre is in itself suggestive. The wholesale butcheries
of the Terror are accountable; even the attempt of Robespierre, St.
Just, and Barere to suppress revolt and discontent by _noyades_ and
_mitraitlades_, if fiendish, is intelligible. It had a political aim. It
satisfied a definite if diabolical desire. But the executions of
veteran philosophers, of grey-haired parish-priests, of harmless
nuns--the deliberate cold-blooded cruelty which punished with death the
resentment, the imprudence, often the mere birth, of orphaned lads; the
prayers or the tears of schoolgirls who might well hav urged the piteous
plea of Sejanus' infant daughter--these recal the indiscriminate
ferocity of wild beasts, the atrocities occasionally committed by
destructive maniacs in an excess of fury, or the infectious frenzies of
lycanthropy and similar forms of epidemic madness, rather than such
human cruelty as prompted the massacre of Drogheda, the butchery of
Melos, or the destruction of Carthage. What could schoolboys have done
worthy of the guillotine, even in the eyes of the Jacobin Club? Girls,
like children, can try the temper and patience of manhood, and among
rough men or in rough times get roughly punished; but when, save in
1793, did men ever think of killing them? There was but one fault
besides their birth--a fault almost inseparable from their birth--which
the boy-ensigns and pages, the convent-bred demoiselles, shared with
their parents; that inalienable, instinctive, inborn grace, that sense,
air, and bearing of superiority, which we find acknowledged alike by the
noble and the _bourgeois_, the _von Adel_ and the _buerger_, acknowledged
by those who regret or resent as distinctly as by those who would uphold
it. The unpardonable sin of the _noblesse_, the inheritance of which
they could not be deprived but with their lives, the secret sting that
maddened the Jacobin to slay not merely the beardless heirs but the
innocent and helpless daughters of the captured chateau, may perhaps be
hinted in a question and answer like the following, between Senior and
De Tocqueville, after the third Revolution had proved its impotence to
ef