It was necessary that Louis XVI should be beheaded and the guillotine permanently set up, in order to manifest the result of the disorders of Louis XIV, of the shameful excesses of Louis XV, and of the licentious immorality of French society.  It was necessary for Louis XIV to be an adulterer, Louis XV a debauchee, the clergy corrupt, and the nobility depraved, to bring about the shocks of the revolution.  The facts mutually correspond; I explain, and I approve.  In the eyes of the modern savant everything is right.

It was necessary that Buonaparte should throw the Corps legislatif out of the window, that he should let loose his armies upon Europe, and leave thousands of dead bodies in the snows of Russia, in order to end the revolution, and extinguish the restless ardor of the French.  It needed the massacres of September, the gloomy days of the Terror, the anarchy of the period of the Directory, to throw dismayed France into the arms of the crowned soldier who was to carry to so high a pitch her glory and her influence.  The facts correspond; I explain, and I approve.  In the eyes of the modern savant, everything is right.

I consider the character of Nero.  I take him at the commencement of his reign, when, being forced to sign the death-warrant of a criminal, he exclaimed—­“Would I were unable to write!” And then again I regard him after he has perpetrated acts such that to apply his name in future ages to the cruellest of tyrants shall appear to them a cruel injury.  What has taken place in the interval?  The development of his natural character, Agrippina, Narcissus ...  I understand the play of all the springs which have made a monster.  As I am out of his clutches, my detestation vanishes with the danger.  “I taste the very deep and very pure pleasure of seeing a mind act according to a definite law.”  I understand, I explain, I approve.  In the eyes of the modern savant, everything is right.

It would be impossible, Gentlemen, to pursue this reasoning to its extreme limits without offending against the commonest decency.  We should have to descend into blood and mire, continuing to declare the while that everything is right.  I pause therefore, and leave the rest to your imaginations.  Open the most dismal pages of history.  Choose out the acts which inspire the most vivid horror and disgust, the blackest examples of ingratitude, the meanest instances of cowardice, the cases of most refined cruelty, and the most hideous debaucheries:  thence let your thoughts pass to facts which bedew the eyelid with the tear of tenderest emotion, to the cases of most heroic self-devotion, to sacrifices the most humble in their greatness; and then try to apply the rule of the modern savant, and to say that all this is equally right and good, and that whatever is has the right to be.  Open the book of your own heart.  Think of one of those base temptations which assault the best of us, one of those thoughts which raise