Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/107

Rh burden on the villager and on the 'farmer who must pay for all.'

XVII. Hence in France the burden of taxation led to the Revolution and its Reign of Terror. I need not go over the details of dissipation, intrigue, extortion and vengeance which brought to sacrifice the 'best that the nation could bring.' In spite of their lust and cruelty, the victims of the Eeign of Terror were literally the best from the standpoint of race development. Their weaknesses were those of training in luxury and irresponsible power. These effects were individual only, and their children were free-born, with the capacity to grow up truly noble if removed from the evil surroundings of the palace.

XVIII. In Thackeray's 'Chronicle of the Drum,' the old drummer, Pierre, tells us that

 Those glorious days of September Saw many aristocrats fall, Twas then that our pikes drank the blood In the beautiful breast of Lamballe.

Pardi, 'twas a beautiful lady, I seldom have looked on her like. And I drummed for a gallant procession That marched with her head on a pike."

Then they showed her pale face to the Queen, who fell fainting, and the mob called for her head and the head of the King. And the slaughter went on until the man on horseback came, and the mob, 'alive but most reluctant,' was itself forced into the graves it had dug for others.

And since that day the 'best that the nation could bring' have been without descendants, the men less manly than the sons of the Girondins would have been, the women less beautiful than the daughters of Lamballe. The political changes which arose may have been for the better; the change in the blood was all for the worse.

XIX. Other influences which destroyed the best were social repression, religious intolerance and the intolerance of irreligion and unscience. It was the atheist mob of Paris which destroyed Lavoisier, with the sneer that the new republic of reason had no use for savants. The old conservatism burned the heretic at the stake, banished the Huguenot, destroyed the lover of freedom, silenced the agitator. Its intolerance gave Cuvier and Agassiz to Switzerland, sent the Le Contes to America, the Jouberts to Holland, and furnished the backbone of the fierce democracy of the Transvaal. While not all agitators are sane, and not all heretics right-minded, yet no nation can spare from its numbers those men who think for themselves and those who act for themselves. It cannot afford to drive away or destroy those who are filled with religious zeal, nor those whose religious zeal takes a form not approved by tradition nor by consent of the masses. All