Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/68

 which the first of her sons may offer in the time of her sore need. All men's mouths were opened against the sins and shames of Paris; stricken of her enemies, forsaken of her friends, the great city was naked to all assault of hostile hands or tongues; she was denied and renounced of Europe; it was time for the poet to take her part. We need not recall, though we cannot but remember, the source of all her ills; the first and foulest crime of a fruitful and baneful series, the murder of the Roman republic by the hands of French republicans; a crime which naturally and perforce brought forth at once its counterpart and its retribution in the minor though monstrous crime of December; which overthrew the triumvirate in Rome, and founded the empire in Panis. For that infamous expedition against right and freedom the nation which perpetrated and the nations which permitted it have since had heavily to pay. Not from the chief criminal alone, but from all accomplices who stood silent by to watch with folded hands the violation of all international conscience and the consummation of all international treason, has time exacted the full price of blood in blood and gold and shame. For the commission by France and the condonation by Europe of the crime which reinthralled a people and reinstalled a priesthood, even the infliction of the second empire was not found too costly an atonement to be exacted by the terrible equity of fate. But that the scourge fell first and heaviest on those Frenchmen who had protested and struggled with all the strength of their conscience and their soul against the sin and the shame of their country, men might have watched almost "with a bitter and severe