The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-03-01

be kind. All of them have had to deal with
exasperatinp phases of monarchical oppres-
sion, and we dare not lightly Judge them.
But when Messrs Garibaldi and Mazzini
wrote their toasts to the deadly banquet in
Paris, they helped to celebrate not only the
death of one weak man who, when he went to
the guillotine, was for once the noblest be-
cause the most Christian man in France, but
the bloody outgush of torrent-like massacre Of
which this execution was the awful source.
They celebrated not only the death OF King
Louis, but of his wife and family; not only of
princes. but of the people-the vices OF Mira
beau, the horrible audaoity of Danton, the
reptile cruelty of Marat, the fatal heartless-
ness of Robespierre-in short, all that makes
intellectual men devils, and the Ednden'ontu0
of tie Reign Of Terror favorite drama for
certain order of the French enthusiasts They
sat down to feast on horrors and might have
remembered that last night when the Giron-
dists supped together. BY straining point
they might have brought themselves round to
celebrate the massacres of the coup detGt; for
murder is murder, whether done by king or
demagogue. ..
Fearful and wonderful, in some points of
view, is the spirit which, after decades of un-
availing bloodshed, rejoices in such an event
as the first murder. Perhaps it is right for
us, however, to accept the late polite convo-
cation of French worms over the memory of
sad King Louis as in the natural order of q
peculiar train of events. 1t is natural, per-
haps, that great self-absorbed, all-absorbing
monsters of personality should have grown
like tumors on a country which has witnessed
the hideous looseness of morals and disre-
spect of all persons shown In the days OF the
guillotine. 1t is natural for the country
which had Robespierre to be punished with
Napoleon, and for Napoleon to be stung with
Rochefort. The worst commentary to be
made on the perniciousness of the Empire
seems to be that in this day of grace men
calling themselves liberals assemble to feast
over the maine of poor blundering king
who, after all, was less laundering than the
scores of his executioners who perished
miserably by the very instrument they
erected-whose offense against France was
slight compared to the crime of its present
ruler, who may soon die, but will not soon
resign or be killed. After nineteen years of
probation, has France not outgrown the
Reign of Terror Has Napoleon only been
an educator of sans culotteS and king-killers?
Has he been training up executioners only to
have it asked who shall put them to death in
their turn !?
A new French caricature represents Napo-
leon speaking to ballet-girl who wears the
liberty cap. The new revolution in France
must oppose the idea of imperialism with
something better than hbertinism. The ex-
cesses of the guillotine, the saturnslias of
terror, were the fruits of ibertinism, and not
liberty, carried out into the extreme of
horror Frenchmen are as able as other men,
but they cannot set right their disjointed
society by new dislocations. They have ter
rible children among them, ready to do
Traupmann's work for iberty's sake in an
age when there are plenty of generous people
who hardly understand that liberty can be
robbed for and butchered for like other selfish
prizes, and that intellectual men can be fasci-
mated with great problems of revenge, and
| come to view conventional assassination as a
necessity. M. Rochefort quotes Robespierre
and Danton and Mirabeau are the apostles
of the young students who in Belgium echoed
Proudhon's teaching in cry of ''Down with
God!" to have it caught up in Spain by a
mad Republican, Suner de Capdevila 1t is
plain that the liberty of the guillotine counts
out one important element in the direction Of
human affairs-tbe A lmiphty