cy 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 cholera, or an earthquake like that of Lisbon, would have. The
energy for which the Jacobin administration is praised was merely the
energy of the Malay who maddens himself with opium, draws his knife, and
runs a-muck through the streets, slashing right and left at friends and
foes. Such has never been the energy of truly great rulers; of
Elizabeth, for example, of Oliver, or of Frederic. They were not,
indeed, scrupulous. But, had they been less scrupulous than they were,
the strength and amplitude of their minds would have preserved them from
crimes such as those which the small men of the Committee of Public
Safety took for daring strokes of policy. The great Queen who so long
held her own against foreign and domestic enemies, against temporal and
spiritual arms; the great Protector who governed with more than regal
power, in despite both of royalists and republicans; the great King who,
with a beaten army and an exhausted treasury, defended his little
dominions to the last against the united efforts of Russia, Austria,
and France--w