A nation of thirty millions of people, had been for ten years
agitated by the most terrible convulsions. There is no atrocity,
which the tongue can name, which had not desolated the doomed land.
Every passion which can degrade the heart of fallen man, had swept
with simoom blast over the cities and the villages of France.
Conflagrations had laid the palaces of the wealthy in ruins, and the
green lawns where their children had played, had been crimsoned with
the blood of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. A gigantic
system of robbery had seized upon houses and lands and every
species of property and had turned thousands of the opulent out
into destitution, beggary, and death. Pollution had been legalized
by the voice of God-defying lust, and France, la belle France
, had been converted into a disgusting warehouse of infamy. Law,
with suicidal hand, had destroyed itself, and the decisions of
the legislature swayed to and fro, in accordance with the hideous
clamors of the mob. The guillotine, with gutters ever clotted
with human gore, was the only argument which anarchy condescended
to use. Effectually it silenced every remonstrating tongue.
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