modern Attila who was guilty of this bloodshed is shown by decorating rooms with portraits and busts of him. See the beliefs which these respective feelings imply:
| Over ten thousand deaths we may fitly shudder and lament. | Two million deaths may be contemplated without much shuddering and lamentation. | |
| As the ten thousand were slain because of the tyrannies, and cruelties, and treacheries, committed by them or by their class, their deaths are especially pitiable. | As the two millions, innocent of offence, were taken against their wills from classes already oppressed and impoverished, the slaughter of them need not excite our pity. | |
| The sufferings of the ten thousand and of their relatives, who expiated their own misdeeds and the misdeeds of their class, may fitly form subjects for heart-rending stories and pathetic pictures. | There is nothing heart-rending in the sufferings of the two millions who died for no crimes of their own or their class; nor need we see pathos in the fates of the poor families throughout France and all neighboring countries from which the two million victims were taken. | |
| That despair and the indignation of a betrayed people brought about this slaughter of ten thousand, makes the atrocity without palliation. | That one man's lust of power was gratified through the deaths of the two millions, greatly palliates the sacrifice of them. |
These are the antithetical propositions tacitly implied in the opinions that have been current in England about the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Only by acceptance of such propositions can these opinions be defended. Such have been the emotions of men that, until quite recently, it has been the habit to speak with detestation of the one set of events, and to speak of the other set of events in words betraying admiration. Nay, even now these feelings are but partially qualified. While the names of the leading actors in the Reign of Terror are names of execration, we speak of Napoleon as "the Great," and Englishmen worship him by visiting his tomb and taking off their hats!
How, then, with such perverting emotions, is it possible to take rational views of sociological facts? Forming, as men do, such astoundingly false conceptions of the relative amounts of evils and the relative characters of motives, how can they judge truly among institutions and actions, past or present? Clearly, minds thus swayed by disproportionate hates and admirations cannot frame those balanced
