Infernal, since not celestial or
terrestrial! Hollowness, insincerity _has_ to cease; sincerity of some
sort has to begin. Cost what it may, reigns of terror, horrors of French
Revolution or what else, we have to return to truth. Here is a Truth, as I
said: a Truth clad in hell-fire, since they would not but have it so!--
A common theory among considerable parties of men in England and elsewhere
used to be, that the French Nation had, in those days, as it were gone
_mad_; that the French Revolution was a general act of insanity, a
temporary conversion of France and large sections of the world into a kind
of Bedlam. The Event had risen and raged; but was a madness and
nonentity,--gone now happily into the region of Dreams and the
Picturesque!--To such comfortable philosophers, the Three Days of July,
183O, must have been a surprising phenomenon. Here is the French Nation
risen again, in musketry and death-struggle, out shooting and being shot,
to make that same mad French Revolution good! The sons and grandsons of
those men, it would seem, persist in the enterprise: they do not disown
it; they will have it made good; will have themselves shot, if it be not
made good.
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