therefore stood out as a great
brain among our aristocrats. And what, if you please, was his grace's
favorite historical episode, which he declared he never read without
intense satisfaction? Why, the young General Bonapart's pounding of the
Paris mob to pieces in 1795, called in playful approval by our
respectable classes "the whiff of grapeshot," though Napoleon, to do
him justice, took a deeper view of it, and would fain have had it
forgotten. And since the Duke of Argyll was not a demon, but a man of
like passions with ourselves, by no means rancorous or cruel as men go,
who can doubt that all over the world proletarians of the ducal kidney
are now revelling in "the whiff of dynamite" (the flavor of the joke
seems to evaporate a little, does it not?) because it was aimed at the
class they hate even as our argute duke hated what he called the mob.

In such an atmosphere there can be only one sequel to the Madrid
explosion. All Europe burns to emulate it. Vengeance! More blood! Tear
"the Anarchist beast" to shreds. Drag him to the scaffold. Imprison him
for life. Let all civilized States band together to drive his like off
the face of the earth; and if any State refuses to join, make war on
it. This time the leading London newspaper, anti-Liberal and therefore
anti-Russian in politics, does not say "Serve you right" to the
victims, as it did, in effect, when Bobrikofl; and De Plehve, and Grand
Duke Sergius, were in the same manner unofficially fulminated into
fragments. No: fulminate our rivals in Asia by all means, ye brave
Russian revolutionaries; but to aim at an English princess-monstrous!
hideous! hound down the wretch to his doom; and observe, please, that
we are a civilized and merciful people, and, however much we may regret
it, must not treat him as Ravaillac and Damiens were treated. And
meanwhile, since we have not yet caught him, let us soothe our
quivering nerves with the bullfight, and comment in a courtly way on
the unfailing tact and good taste of the ladies of our royal houses,
who, though presumably of full normal natural tenderness, have been so
effectually broken in to fashionable routine that they can be taken to
see the horses slaughtered as helplessly as they could no doubt be
taken to a gladiator show, if that happened to be the mode just now.

Strangely enough, in the midst of this raging fire of malice, the one
man who still has faith in the kindness and intelligence of human
nature is the f