. The infidel, the
heretic, was to be run down like a mad dog. No outrage committed by the
Catholic warrior on the miscreant enemy could deserve punishment. As
soon as it was known that boundless license was thus given to barbarity
and dissoluteness, thousands of wretches who cared nothing for the
sacred cause, but who were eager to be exempted from the police of
peaceful cities, and the discipline of well-governed camps, flocked to
the standard of the faith. The men who had set up that standard were
sincere, chaste, regardless of lucre, and, perhaps, where only
themselves were concerned, not unforgiving; but round that standard were
assembled such gangs of rogues, ravishers, plunderers, and ferocious
bravoes, as were scarcely ever found under the flag of any state engaged
in a mere temporal quarrel. In a very similar way was the Jacobin party
composed. There was a small nucleus of enthusiasts; round that nucleus
was gathered a vast mass of ignoble depravity; and in all that mass
there was nothing so depraved and so ignoble as Barere.

Then came those days when the most barbarous of all codes was
administered by the most barbarous of all tribunals; when no man could
greet his neighbors, or say his prayers, or dress his hair, without
danger of committing a capital crime; when spies lurked in every corner;
when the guillotine was long and hard at work every morning; when the
jails were filled 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 Sans-Culottide by its old superstitious name of St.
Matthew's Day. While the daily wagon-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 mer