Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 6.djvu/20

viii horrible than to butcher defenceless men in this way? As a fact, murderous traps of this kind are sanctioned by the custom of the country, and by the impossibility of managing matters otherwise. 'Tis then that the maxim of Figaro, Ma per Dio, l'utilità, comes in. If a minister whom I will not name had found Arnauts ready to shoot at his orders, and if at a state dinner he had despatched the chief members of the Left, the action would have been, as far as actual fact went, the same as that of the Pasha of Egypt, but morally it would have been a hundred times more blameworthy. Yet this minister turned into the streets many Liberal electors who were small government functionaries, frightened the rest, and made the elections go as he wished. If Mehemet Ali had been a French minister he also would have taken no stronger measures, and in the same way the French minister would doubtless, in Egypt, have been obliged to take to the fusillade, turnings out of office not being calculated to produce a sufficient moral effect on Mamelukes.

The massacre of St. Bartholomew was a great crime even for its own day; but, I repeat, a massacre as such in the sixteenth century was not the same crime as a massacre in the nineteenth. Let us add that the greater part of the