is, noting in his
diary a conversation with General Dalrymple, a kinsman of the rather
celebrated Madame Elliot, observes, 'he tells me of certain horrors
committed in Arras, but to these things we are familiarised.'

It was this essentially criminal and anarchical character of the
Revolution of 1789 which brought on 'the Terror,' not 'the Terror' which
engendered the crime and the anarchy.

Why should 'horrors' have been committed at Arras in 1789? The
contemporary documents show that the people in and about Arras were much
better off in 1789 than they had ever before been. The renting value of
farms about Arras was nearly or quite thirty per cent. higher in 1750
than it had been in 1700, and it was nearly or quite 100 per cent.
higher in 1800 than in 1750. M. de Calonne cites a farm which had
brought only 1,800 livres in 1714 as bringing, in 1784, 3,800 livres.
Men paid these advanced prices not for the ownership of the land, which
before 1789 carried with it certain social distinctions and advantages,
but for the use, the productive and commercial use, of the land. The
horrors of which General Dalrymple spoke, at Arras as elsewhere
throughout France--here, in the Laonnais and the Soissonnais, in
Provence, in Normandy, in Languedoc--were perpetrated not by a
downtrodden peasantry, rising to shake off oppression, nor yet in the
frenzy of a great popular rally to resist a foreign invader. They were
an outburst of crime stimulated, no doubt, as we are now enabled, by
fearless and conscientious investigators of the documentary history of
France, to see, by cabals of political conspirators at Paris, just as
the Gordon riots at London in 1780 were stimulated by anti-Catholic
fanatics. But in both cases the perpetrators were governed by the mere
lust of pillage and destruction. Chateaux were broken into, sacked, and
burned here in the Laonnais and the Soissonnais, as Lord Mansfield's
house was broken into, sacked, and burned in London, because they were
full of valuables to be looted. As the drama went on, other passions
came into play--passions not less but more ignoble than the mere savage
lust of plunder and destruction. A branded rogue and libeller, Brissot,
hurried back from his exile beyond the Atlantic to compete with Camille
Desmoulins in that noble work of 'denouncing' his fellow-citizens, which
earned for Camille the ghastly title of '_procureur de la lanterne_.'
Madame Roland, 'the soul of the Gironde,' sustained