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We used to lie in bed and read Gibbon about the massacres of the Christians, I remember when we were supposed to be asleep. It's no joke, I can tell you, readin' a great big book, in double columns, by a night-light, and the light that comes through a chink in the door. Then there were the moths tiger moths, yellow moths, and horrid cockchafers. Louisa, my sister, would have the window open.
To me all of them told the full story of what went before and necessitated the great French revolution the long precedent crushing of the masses of a heroic people into the earth, in abject poverty, hunger every right denied, humanity attempted to be put back for generations yet Nature's force, titanic here, the stronger and hardier for that repression waiting terribly to break forth, revengeful the pressure on the dykes, and the bursting at last the storming of the Bastile the execution of the king and queen the tempest of massacres and blood.
The picture is not so Utopian as it sounds. It is a very fair sketch of the social structure of a Macedonian village community under Turkish rule, with the massacres left out.
Are you not aware that the most risible imp could hardly laugh at all the contents of the Bible? Who laughs at the saying, "Blessed are the peacemakers"? Who laughs at the horrid massacres of the Old Testament? But who does not laugh at cock-and-bull stories like that of Jonah and the whale? Your lordship does not discriminate.
The massacres, and other outrages, while methodical, were remittent, wave-like, sometimes in one Southern State, sometimes another, and occurring only in years of hot political conflict, until one after another of those States had, by these crimes, been again brought under the absolute control of the old Rebel leaders. By 1876, they had almost succeeded in their entire programme.
Only your French Revolutions and your Russian Massacres mark the spots where the two armies have met, where blood has flowed like wine from the broken goblets of some thousands of lives. But usually it is the forced marches, with the enemy ever retreating over its own ground. And in this position of women, it is the army of Nature that has begun to move.
There was the treacherous massacre of Retief and Potgeiter and his party by the Zulu king Dingaan at his military kraal, followed by other wholesale massacres of men, women, and children at Weenen and other Boer camps in Natal.
The king's brothers and many of the nobles fled in affright across the frontier, and tried to induce other sovereigns to take up the cause of royalty in France and restore the former order of things. When this treaty became known, war at once followed. Robespierre and other self-constituted leaders in Paris held sway for a while, and the most frightful massacres of nobles and priests ensued.
Were we all liars in that room, and did any of the men there know that when words of friendship were on their lips there was hatred in their hearts and in each country a stealthy preparation for great massacres of men? Did any of, those German editors hear afar off the thunderstrokes of the Krupp guns which even then were being tested for the war with France and England?
"Instead of diminishing the number of wars, ecclesiastical influence has actually and very seriously increased it; we may look in vain for any period since Constantine in which the clergy as a body exerted themselves to repress the military spirit, or to prevent or abridge a particular war with an energy at all comparable to that which they displayed in stimulating the fanaticism of the Crusades, in producing the atrocious massacres of the Albigenses, in embittering the religious contests that followed the Reformation."
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