“Historical recriminations, however, are not edifying.  It is perfectly fair, when Catholics talk of the atheist Terror, to rejoin that the retainers of Anjou and Montpensier slew more men and women on the first day of the Saint Bartholomew, than perished in Paris through the Years I. and II.  But the retort does us no good beyond the region of dialectic.  Some of the opinions of Chaumette were full of enlightenment and hope.  But it would be far better to share the superstitious opinions of a virtuous and benignant priest, like the Bishop in Victor Hugo’s Miserables, than to hold these good opinions of Chaumette, as he held them, with a rancorous intolerance, a reckless disregard of the rights and feelings of others, and a shallow forgetfulness of all that great and precious part of our nature that lies out of the domain of the logical understanding....  In every family where a mother sought to have her child baptised, or where sons and daughters sought to have the dying spirit of the old consoled by the last sacrament, there sprang up a bitter enemy to the government which had closed the churches and proscribed the priests.  How could a society whose spiritual life had been nourished in the solemn mysticism of the Middle Ages suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy paganism?  The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by apostate priests ... as they filed before the Convention, led by the Archbishop of Paris, and accompanied by rude acolytes bearing piles of the robes and the vessels of silver and gold with which they had once served their holy office."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Misc. i 77-79.]

Where is the effrontery, the search for methods in the Reign of Terror, the applause for revolutionary models?  Such inexcusable perversion of a writer’s meaning for an evanescent political object—­and a very shabby object too—­is enough to make one think that George III. knew what he was talking about, when he once delivered himself of the saying that “Politics are a trade for a rascal, not for a gentleman.”

Let me cite another more grotesque piece of irrelevancy with a similar drift.  Some months ago the present writer chanced to express an opinion upon Welsh Disestablishment.  Wales, at any rate, would seem to be far enough away from Emile, Candide, the Law of Prairial, and the Committee of Public Safety.  The Times, however, instantly said[1] that it would be affectation to express any surprise, because my unfortunate “theories and principles, drawn from French sources and framed on French models, all tend to the disintegration of comprehensive political organisations and the encouragement of arrangements based on the minor peculiarities of race or dialect.”  Was there ever in the world such prodigious nonsense?  What French sources, what French models?  If French models point in any one direction rather than another, it is away from disintegration and straight towards centralisation.