et the enemy
perish," he cried; "I have already said it from this tribune. It is only
the dead man who never comes back. Kings will not conspire against us in
the grave. Armies will not fight against us when they are annihilated.
Let our war with them be a war of extermination. What pity is due to
slaves whom the Emperor leads to war under the cane; whom the King of
Prussia beats to the shambles with the flat of the sword; and whom the
Duke of York makes drunk with rum and gin?" And at the rum and gin the
Mountain and the galleries laughed again.

If Barere had been able to effect his purpose, it is difficult to
estimate the extent of the calamity which he would have brought on the
human race. No government, however averse to cruelty, could, in justice
to its own subjects, have given quarter to enemies who gave none.
Retaliation would have been, not merely justifiable, but a sacred duty.
It would have been necessary for Howe and Nelson to make every French
sailor whom they took walk the plank. England has no peculiar reason to
dread the introduction of such a system. On the contrary, the operation
of Barere's new law of war would have been more unfavorable to his
countrymen than to ours; for we believe that, from the beginning to the
end of the war, there never was a time at which the number of French
prisoners in England was not greater than the number of English
prisoners in France; and so, we apprehend, it will be in all wars while
England retains her maritime superiority. Had the murderous decree of
the Convention been in force from 1794 to 1815, we are satisfied that,
for every Englishman slain by the French, at least three Frenchmen would
have been put to the sword by the English. It is, therefore, not as
Englishmen, but as members of the great society of mankind, that we
speak with indignation and horror of the change which Barere attempted
to introduce. The mere slaughter would have been the smallest part of
the evil. The butchering of a single unarmed man in cold blood, under an
act of the legislature, would have produced more evil than the carnage
of ten such fields as Albuera. Public law would have been subverted from
the foundations; national enmities would have been inflamed to a degree
of rage which happily it is not easy for us to conceive; cordial peace
would have been impossible. The moral character of the European nations
would have been rapidly and deeply corrupted; for in all countries those
men whos