as close as the hold of a slave-ship; when the
gutters ran foaming with blood into the Seine; when it was death to
be great-niece of a captain of the royal guards, or half-brother of a
doctor of the Sorbonne, to express a doubt whether assignats would not
fall, to hint that the English had been victorious in the action of the
first of June, to have a copy of one of Burke's pamphlets locked up in a
desk, to laugh at a Jacobin for taking the name of Cassius or Timoleon,
or to call the Fifth Sansculottide by its old superstitious name of St
Matthew's Day. While the daily waggon-loads of victims were carried
to their doom through the streets of Paris, the Proconsuls whom the
sovereign Committee had sent forth to the departments revelled in an
extravagance of cruelty unknown even in the capital. The knife of the
deadly machine rose and fell too slow for their work of slaughter. Long
rows of captives were mowed down with grapeshot. Holes were made in the
bottom of crowded barges. Lyons was turned into a desert. At Arras even
the cruel mercy of a speedy death was denied to the prisoners. All
down the Loire, from Saumur to the sea, great flocks of crows and kites
feasted on naked corpses, twined together in hideous embraces. No
mercy was shown to sex or age. The number of young lads and of girls
of seventeen who were murdered by that execrable government is to be
reckoned by hundreds. Babies torn from the breast were tossed from pike
to pike along the Jacobin ranks. One champion of liberty had his pockets
well stuffed with ears. Another swaggered about with the finger of a
little child in his hat. A few months had sufficed to degrade France
below the level of New Zealand.

It is absurd to say that any amount of public danger can justify a
system like this, we do not say on Christian principles, we do not
say on the principles of a high morality, but even on principles
of Machiavellian policy. It is true that great emergencies call for
activity and vigilance; it is true that they justify severity which, in
ordinary times, would deserve the name of cruelty. But indiscriminate
severity can never, under any circumstances, be useful. It is plain
that the whole efficacy of punishment depends on the care with which the
guilty are distinguished. Punishment which strikes the guilty and the
innocent promiscuously, operates merely like a pestilence or a great
convulsion of nature, and has no more tendency to prevent offences
than the chol