Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

CHARACTER OF ROBESriEKRE.39

to forget that a good man should prefer justice and truth to every other consideration.

It has been said that Robespierre was not naturally cruel. `\Yhat of that ? He was one in whom envy had become omnipotent. Envy, nursed and fed by the well-merited humiliations that this man had endured, under the state of society which preceded the revolution, had suggested to him the idea of a revenge so atrocious, that the meanness of his soul and the hardness of his heart scarcely suffice to persuade us that he was capable of realising it. To write in blood, to calculate by heads, such were the processes of political arithmetic to which France submitted under the government of Robespierre. She does yet worse in the present day — she listens to those who would justify him.

To accept as an excuse for murder, that which renders it the more odious, the sang froid and the ulterior plans of the murderer, is to contribute to one of the most crying evils of our age, the perversion of human judgment. The men of the present day, in the decisions dictated by their false sensibility, proceed with an impartiality that annihilates the principles of good and evil; to arrange matters upon earth to their own liking, they have abolished, at one blow, heaven and hell.

Such are the sophisms to which the pretended amelioration of our manners leads—an amelioration which is nothing more than a supreme moral indifference, a deeply-rooted religious incredulity, and an ever-increasing avidity for sensual gratifications ; but patience,—the world has ere now recovered from a yet more hopeless state.