ith what scorn would they have heard that it was impossible
for them to strike a salutary terror into the disaffected without
sending schoolboys and schoolgirls to death by cartloads and boatloads!

The popular notion is, we believe, that the leading Terrorists were
wicked men, but, at the same time, great men. We can see nothing great
about them but their wickedness. That their policy was daringly original
is a vulgar error. Their policy is as old as the oldest accounts which
we have of human misgovernment. It seemed new in France and in the
eighteenth century only because it had been long disused, for excellent
reasons, by the enlightened part of mankind. But it has always
prevailed, and still prevails, in savage and half-savage nations, and is
the chief cause which prevents such nations from making advances towards
civilization. Thousands of deys, of beys, of pachas, of rajahs, of
nabobs, have shown themselves as great masters of statecraft as the
members of the Committee of Public Safety. Djezzar, we imagine, was
superior to any of them in their new line. In fact, there is not a petty
tyrant in Asia or Africa so dull or so unlearned as not to be fully
qualified for the business of Jacobin police and Jacobin finance. To
behead people by scores without caring whether they are guilty or
innocent; to wring money out of the rich by the help of jailers and
executioners; to rob the public creditor, and to put him to death if he
remonstrates; to take loaves by force out of the bakers' shops; to
clothe and mount soldiers by seizing on one man's wool and linen, and on
another man's horses and saddles, without compensation, is of all modes
of governing the simplest and most obvious. Of its morality we at
present say nothing. But surely it requires no capacity beyond that of a
barbarian or a child. By means like those which we have described, the
Committee of Public Safety undoubtedly succeeded, for a short time, in
enforcing profound submission and in raising immense funds. But to
enforce submission by butchery, and to raise funds by spoliation, is not
statesmanship. The real statesman is he who, in troubled times, keeps
down the turbulent without unnecessarily harassing the well-affected;
and who, when great pecuniary resources are needed, provides for the
public exigencies without violating the security of property and drying
up the sources of future prosperity. Such a statesman, we are confident,
might, in 1793, have preserv