THE BLOOD OF THE NATION. 97 



creasing burden on the villager and on the 'farmer who must pay for 

 all.' 



XVII. Hence in France the burden of taxation led to the Revolu- 

 tion and its Eeign of Terror. I need not go over the details of dissipa- 

 tion, intrigue, extortion and vengeance which brought to sacrifice the 

 'best that the nation could bring.' In spite of their lust and cruelty, 

 the victims of the Eeign of Terror were literally the best from the 

 standpoint of race development. Their weaknesses were those of train- 

 ing in luxury and irresponsible power. These effects were individual 

 only, and their children were free-born, with the capacity to grow up 

 truly noble if removed from the evil surroundings of the palace. 



XVIII. In Thackeray's 'Chronicle of the Drum,' the old drummer, 



Pierre, tells us that 



"Those glorious days of September ' 



Saw many aristocrats fall, 

 'Twas then that our pikes drank the blood 

 In the beautiful breast of Lamballe. 



"Pardi, 'twas a beautiful lady, 



I seldom have looked on her like. 

 And I drummed for a gallant procession 

 That marched with her head on a pike." 



Then they showed her pale face to the Queen, who fell fainting, and 

 the mob called for her head and the head of the King. And the slaugh- 

 ter went on until the man on horseback came, and the mob, 'alive but 

 most reluctant,' was itself forced into the graves it had dug for others. 



And since that day the 'best that the nation could bring' have been 

 without descendants, the men less manly than the sons of the Girondins 

 would have been, the women less beautiful than the daughters of Lam- 

 balle. The political changes which arose may have been for the better; 

 the change in the blood was all for the worse. 



XIX. Other influences which destroyed the best were social re- 

 pression, religious intolerance and the intolerance of irreligion and 

 imscience. It was the atheist mob of Paris which destroyed Lavoisier, 

 with the sneer that the new republic of reason had no use for savants. 

 The old conservatism burned the heretic at the stake, banished the 

 Huguenot, destroyed the lover of freedom, silenced the agitator. Its 

 intolerance gave Cuvier and Agassiz to Switzerland, sent the Le Contes 

 to America, the Jouberts to Holland, and furnished the backbone 

 of the fierce democracy of the Transvaal. While not all agitators 

 are sane, and not all heretics right-minded, yet no nation can spare 

 from its numbers those men who think for themselves and those who 

 act for themselves. It cannot afford to drive away or destroy those 

 who are filled with religious zeal, nor those whose religious zeal takes 

 a form not approved by tradition nor by consent of the masses. All 



VOL. LIX.— 7. 



