Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/339

 BETWEEN THE CZAK AND THE SULTAN. 297 were shot in batches and thrown into pits.* On chap. the other hand, the adherents of the French Em- xlV ' m peror deny that the troops did duty as execution- ers. Therefore the value of an Imperialist denial, with all such weight as may be thought to belong to it, is set against the imperfect proof on which Paris founds her belief ; but men must remember why it is that any obscurity can hang upon a question like this. The question whether, on the night of a given Thursday and a given Friday, whole batches of men living in Paris were taken out and shot by platoons in such places as the Champ de Mars or the Luxembourg gardens — this is a question which, from its very nature, could not have remained in doubt for forty-eight hours, unless Paris at the time had lost her free- dom of speech and her freedom of printing ; and even now, after a lapse of years, if freedom were restored to France, the question would be quickly and righteously determined. Now it happens that those who took away from Paris her freedom of speecli and her freedom of printing are the very persons of whom it is said that during two Decem- ber nights they caused their fellow-countrymen to be shot by platoons and in batches. So it comes to forming part of Louis Napoleon's military entourage — who en- tered the Union Club of Paris in a state of joyous excitemi at, paying with exultation that he had just been 'assisting' at the shooting of 165 insurgents in the Champ de Mars. It is right to say that some time afterwards, when the fashion of thus boasting had a little declined, the man said he rnight tare ' un pen exagere '—Note to [>th Edition.
 * I now have the name of a man — a man widely known, and