ase
and peace, to that soulless degradation, which (as in the Byzantine
empire of old, and seeming in the Chinese empire of to-day) hides the
reality of barbarism under a varnish of civilisation. Men had to be
awakened; to be taught to think for themselves, act for themselves, to
dare and suffer side by side for their country and for their children; in
a word, to arise and become men once more.

And, what is more, men had to punish--to avenge. Those are fearful
words. But there is, in this God-guided universe, a law of retribution,
which will find men out, whether men choose to find it out or not; a law
of retribution; of vengeance inflicted justly, though not necessarily by
just men. The public executioner was seldom a very estimable personage,
at least under the old Regime; and those who have been the scourges of
God have been, in general, mere scourges, and nothing better; smiting
blindly, rashly, confusedly; confounding too often the innocent with the
guilty, till they have seemed only to punish crime by crime, and replace
old sins by new. But, however insoluble, however saddening that puzzle
be, I must believe--as long as I believe in any God at all--that such men
as Robespierre were His instruments, even in their crimes.

In the case of the French Revolution, indeed, the wickedness of certain
of its leaders was part of the retribution itself. For the noblesse
existed surely to make men better. It did, by certain classes, the very
opposite. Therefore it was destroyed by wicked men, whom it itself had
made wicked. For over and above all political, economic, social wrongs,
there were wrongs personal, human, dramatic; which stirred not merely the
springs of covetousness or envy, or even of a just demand for the freedom
of labour and enterprise: but the very deepest springs of rage, contempt,
and hate; wrongs which caused, as I believe, the horrors of the
Revolution.

It is notorious how many of the men most deeply implicated in those
horrors were of the artist class--by which I signify not merely painters
and sculptors--as the word artist has now got, somewhat strangely, to
signify, at least in England--but what the French meant by
_artistes_--producers of luxuries and amusements, play-actors, musicians,
and suchlike, down to that "distracted peruke-maker with two fiery
torches," who, at the storm of the Bastile, "was for burning the
saltpetres of the Arsenal, had not a woman run screaming; had not a
patri