Page:Lectures on the French Revolution of John Acton.djvu/104

92 this is the view of Jefferson on the massacres of September: "Many guilty persons fell without the forms of trial, and with them some innocent. These I deplore as much as anybody. But—it was necessary to use the arm of the people, a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs, but blind to a certain degree—was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?" There is a work in twelve stout volumes, written to prove that it was all the outcome of the Classics, and due to Harmodius, and Brutus, and Timoleon.

But you will find that murder, approved and acknowledged, is not an epidemic peculiar to any time, or any country, or any opinion. We need not include hot-blooded nations of the South in order to define it as one characteristic of modern Monarchy. You may trace it in the Kings of France, Francis I., Charles IX., Henry III., Lewis XIII., Lewis XIV., in the Emperors Ferdinand I. and II., in Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart, in James and William. Still more if you consider a class of men, not much worse, according to general estimate, than their neighbours, that is, the historians. They have praise and hero-worship for nearly every one of these anointed culprits. The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weaker man with the sponge. First, the criminal who slays; then the sophist who defends the slayer.

The royalists pursued the same tradition through the revolutionary times. Ce>utti advised that Mirabeau and Target should be removed by poison; Chateaubriand wished to poniard Condorcet, and Malesherbes admired him for it; the name of Georges Cadoudal was held in honour, because his intended victim was Napoleon; La Rochejaquelein entertained the same scheme, and made no secret of it to the general, Sgur. Adair found them indignant at Vienna because Fox had refused to have the Emperor murdered, and warned him of the plot.

Those who judge morality by the intention have been less shocked at the crimes of power, where the temptation is so strong and the danger so slight, than at those committed by men resisting oppression. Assuredly, the