other thousand years!

It was the frightfullest thing ever borne of Time? One of the
frightfullest. This Convention, now grown Anti-Jacobin, did, with an eye
to justify and fortify itself, publish Lists of what the Reign of
Terror had perpetrated: Lists of Persons Guillotined. The Lists, cries
splenetic Abbe Montgaillard, were not complete. They contain the names
of, How many persons thinks the reader?--Two Thousand all but a few.
There were above Four Thousand, cries Montgaillard: so many were
guillotined, fusilladed, noyaded, done to dire death; of whom Nine
Hundred were women. (Montgaillard, iv. 241.) It is a horrible sum of
human lives, M. l'Abbe:--some ten times as many shot rightly on a field
of battle, and one might have had his Glorious-Victory with Te-Deum. It
is not far from the two-hundredth part of what perished in the entire
Seven Years War. By which Seven Years War, did not the great Fritz
wrench Silesia from the great Theresa; and a Pompadour, stung by
epigrams, satisfy herself that she could not be an Agnes Sorel? The head
of man is a strange vacant sounding-shell, M. l'Abbe; and studies Cocker
to small purpose.

But what if History, somewhere on this Planet, were to hear of a Nation,
the third soul of whom had not for thirty weeks each year as many
third-rate potatoes as would sustain him? (Report of the Irish Poor-Law
Commission, 1836.) History, in that case, feels bound to consider that
starvation is starvation; that starvation from age to age presupposes
much: History ventures to assert that the French Sansculotte of
Ninety-three, who, roused from long death-sleep, could rush at once
to the frontiers, and die fighting for an immortal Hope and Faith of
Deliverance for him and his, was but the second-miserablest of men! The
Irish Sans-potato, had he not senses then, nay a soul? In his frozen
darkness, it was bitter for him to die famishing; bitter to see his
children famish. It was bitter for him to be a beggar, a liar and a
knave. Nay, if that dreary Greenland-wind of benighted Want, perennial
from sire to son, had frozen him into a kind of torpor and numb
callosity, so that he saw not, felt not, was this, for a creature with a
soul in it, some assuagement; or the cruellest wretchedness of all?

Such things were, such things are; and they go on in silence peaceably:
and Sansculottisms follow them. History, looking back over this France
through long times, back to Turgot's time for instance, when dum