arouse an undistinguishing cruelty, and, in some of the leading actors, a cold-blooded ferocity. Nevertheless, recognizing all this—recognizing also the truth that those who wreaked this vengeance were intrinsically no better than those on whom it was wreaked—we must admit that the bloodshed had its excuse. The panic of a people threatened with reimposition of dreadful shackles was not to be wondered at. That the expected return of a time like that, in which gaunt figures and haggard faces about the towns and the country indicated the social disorganization, should excite men to a blind fury, was not unnatural. If they became frantic at the thought that there was coming back a state under which there might again be a slaying of hundreds of thousands of men in battles fought to gratify the spite of a king's concubine, we need not be greatly astonished. And some of the horror expressed at the fate of the ten thousand victims might fitly be reserved for the abominations which caused it.
From this partially-excusable bloodshed, over which men shudder excessively, let us turn now to the immeasurably greater bloodshed, having no excuse, over which they do not shudder at all. Out of the sanguinary chaos of the Revolution, there presently rose a soldier whose immense ability, joined with his absolute unscrupulousness, made him now general, now consul, now autocrat. He was untruthful in an extreme degree, lying in his dispatches day by day, never writing a page without bad faith,[1] nay, even giving to others lessons in telling falsehoods.[2] He professed friendship while plotting to betray, and quite early in his career made the wolf-and-lamb fable his guide. He got antagonists into his power by promises of clemency, and then executed them. To strike terror, he descended to barbarities like those of the blood-thirsty conquerors of old, of whom his career reminds us: as in Egypt, when, to avenge fifty of his soldiers, he beheaded 2,000 fellahs, throwing their headless corpses into the Nile; or as at Jaffa, when 2,500 of the garrison, who finally surrendered, were at his order deliberately massacred. Even his own officers, not over-scrupulous, as we may suppose, were shocked by his brutality—sometimes refusing to execute his sanguinary decrees. Indeed, the instincts of the savage were scarcely at all qualified in him by what we call moral sentiments; as we see in his proposal to burn "two or three of the larger communes" in La Vendée; as we see in his wish to introduce bull-fights into France, and to revive the combats of the Roman arena; as we see in the cold-blooded sacrifice of his own soldiers, when he ordered a useless outpost attack merely that his mistress might witness an engagement! That such a man should have prompted the individual killing of leading antagonists, and set prices on their heads, as in the cases of Mourad-Bey and Count Frotté, and that to remove the Duc d'Enghien he should have committed a crime
