What ferocity of character drew on the fate of Elizabeth, the sister of King Louis the Sixteenth?  For which of the vices of that pattern of benevolence, of piety, and of all the virtues, did they put her to death?  For which of her vices did they put to death the mildest of all human creatures, the Duchess of Biron?  What were the crimes of those crowds of matrons and virgins of condition, whom they mas sacred, with their juries of blood, in prisons and on scaffolds?  What were the enormities of the infant king, whom they caused, by lingering tortures, to perish in their dungeon, and whom if at last they dispatched by poison, it was in that detestable crime the only act of mercy they have ever shown?

What softening of character is to be had, what review of their social situations and duties is to be taught by these examples to kings, to nobles, to men of property, to women, and to infants?  The royal family perished because it was royal.  The nobles perished because they were noble.  The men, women, and children, who had property, because they had property to be robbed of.  The priests were punished, after they had been robbed of their all, not for their vices, but for their virtues and their piety, which made them an honor to their sacred profession, and to that nature of which we ought to be proud, since they belong to it.  My Lord, nothing can be learned from such examples, except the danger of being kings, queens, nobles, priests, and children, to be butchered on account of their inheritance.  These are things at which not vice, not crime, not folly, but wisdom, goodness, learning, justice, probity, beneficence, stand aghast.  By these examples our reason and our moral sense are not enlightened, but confounded; and there is no refuge for astonished and affrighted virtue, but being annihilated in humility and submission, sinking into a silent adoration of the inscrutable dispensations of Providence, and flying with trembling wings from this world of daring crimes, and feeble, pusillanimous, half-bred, bastard justice, to the asylum of another order of things, in an unknown form, but in a better life.

Whatever the politician or preacher of September or of October may think of the matter, it is a most comfortless, disheartening, desolating example.  Dreadful is the example of ruined innocence and virtue, and the completest triumph of the completest villany that ever vexed and disgraced mankind!  The example is ruinous in every point of view, religious, moral, civil, political.  It establishes that dreadful maxim of Machiavel, that in great affairs men are not to be wicked by halves.  This maxim is not made for a middle sort of beings, who, because they cannot be angels, ought to thwart their ambition, and not endeavor to become infernal spirits.  It is too well exemplified in the present time, where the faults and errors of humanity, checked by the imperfect, timorous virtues, have been overpowered by those who have stopped at no crime.  It is