Grown bolder, as the
first feeling of mankind decayed and the color of these horrors began to
fade upon the imagination, they proceeded from apology to defence. They
urged, but still deplored, the absolute necessity of such a proceeding.
Then they made a bolder stride, and marched from defence to
recrimination. They attempted to assassinate the memory of those whose
bodies their friends had massacred, and to consider their murder as a
less formal act of justice. They endeavored even to debauch our pity,
and to suborn it in favor of cruelty. They wept over the lot of those
who were driven by the crimes of aristocrats to republican vengeance.
Every pause of their cruelty they considered as a return of their
natural sentiments of benignity and justice. Then they had recourse to
history, and found out all the recorded cruelties that deform the annals
of the world, in order that the massacres of the Regicides might pass
for a common event, and even that the most merciful of princes, who
suffered by their hands, should bear the iniquity of all the tyrants who
have at any time infested the earth. In order to reconcile us the better
to this republican tyranny, they confounded the bloodshed of war with
the murders of peace; and they computed how much greater prodigality of
blood was exhibited in battles and in the storm of cities than in the
frugal, well-ordered massacres of the revolutionary tribunals of France.
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