* that, in the light of the most disastrous experience, instead of regarding it as a curse they should have glorified it as a boon;
* that many of them--an entire party; almost all of the Assembly--should have venerated it as a religious dogma and carried it to extremes with enthusiasm and rigor of faith;
* that, driven by it into a narrow strait, ever getting narrower and narrower, they should have continued to crush each other at every step;
* that, finally, on reaching the visionary temple of their so-called liberty, they should have found themselves in a slaughter-house, and, within its precincts, should have become in turn butcher and brute;
* that, through their maxims of a universal and perfect liberty they should have inaugurated a despotism worthy of Dahomey, a tribunal like that of the Inquisition, and raised human hecatombs like those of ancient Mexico;
* that amidst their prisons and scaffolds they should persist in believing in the righteousness of their cause, in their own humanity, in their virtue, and, on their fall, have regarded themselves as martyrs--
is certainly strange. Such intellectual aberration, such excessive conceit are rarely encountered, and a concurrence of circumstances, the like of which has never been seen in the world but once, was necessary to produce it.[1108]