more than one fifth of those that passed in the single city of Paris in three months.  I followed up the inquiry relative to that city through several of the subsequent months, until I was tired, and found the proportions still the same.  Since then I have heard that they have declared for a revisal of these laws:  but I know of nothing done.  It appears as if the contract that renovates the world was under no law at all.  From this we may take our estimate of the havoc that has been made through all the relations of life.  With the Jacobins of France, vague intercourse is without reproach; marriage is reduced to the vilest concubinage; children are encouraged to cut the throats of their parents; mothers are taught that tenderness is no part of their character, and, to demonstrate their attachment to their party, that they ought to make no scruple to rake with their bloody hands in the bowels of those who came from their own.

To all this let us join the practice of cannibalism, with which, in the proper terms, and with the greatest truth, their several factions accuse each other.  By cannibalism I mean their devouring, as a nutriment of their ferocity, some part of the bodies of those they have murdered, their drinking the blood of their victims, and forcing the victims themselves to drink the blood of their kindred slaughtered before their faces.  By cannibalism I mean also to signify all their nameless, unmanly, and abominable insults on the bodies of those they slaughter.

As to those whom they suffer to die a natural death, they do not permit them to enjoy the last consolations of mankind, or those rights of sepulture which indicate hope, and which mere Nature has taught to mankind, in all countries, to soothe the afflictions and to cover the infirmity of mortal condition.  They disgrace men in the entry into life, they vitiate and enslave them through the whole course of it, and they deprive them of all comfort at the conclusion of their dishonored and depraved existence.  Endeavoring to persuade the people that they are no better than beasts, the whole body of their institution tends to make them beasts of prey, furious and savage.  For this purpose the active part of them is disciplined into a ferocity which has no parallel.  To this ferocity there is joined not one of the rude, unfashioned virtues which accompany the vices, where the whole are left to grow up together in the rankness of uncultivated Nature.  But nothing is left to Nature in their systems.

The same discipline which hardens their hearts relaxes their morals.  Whilst courts of justice were thrust out by revolutionary tribunals, and silent churches were only the funeral monuments of departed religion, there were no fewer than nineteen or twenty theatres, great and small, most of them kept open at the public expense, and all of them crowded every night.  Among the gaunt, haggard forms of famine and nakedness, amidst the yells of murder, the tears of affliction,