prosperous plutocracy. One man is sufficiently moved by that
contrast to pay his own life as the price of one terrible blow at
the responsible parties. Unhappily his poverty leaves him also
ignorant enough to be duped by the pretence that the innocent
young bride and bridegroom, put forth and crowned by plutocracy
as the heads of a State in which they have less personal power
than any policeman, and less influence than any chairman of a
trust, are responsible. At them accordingly he launches his
sixpennorth of fulminate, missing his mark, but scattering the
bowels of as many horses as any bull in the arena, and slaying
twenty-three persons, besides wounding ninety-nine. And of all
these, the horses alone are innocent of the guilt he is avenging:
had he blown all Madrid to atoms with every adult person in it,
not one could have escaped the charge of being an accessory,
before, at, and after the fact, to poverty and prostitution, to
such wholesale massacre of infants as Herod never dreamt of, to
plague, pestilence and famine, battle, murder and lingering
death--perhaps not one who had not helped, through example,
precept, connivance, and even clamor, to teach the dynamiter his
well-learnt gospel of hatred and vengeance, by approving every
day of sentences of years of imprisonment so infernal in its
unnatural stupidity and panic-stricken cruelty, that their
advocates can disavow neither the dagger nor the bomb without
stripping the mask of justice and humanity from themselves also.
Be it noted that at this very moment there appears the biography
of one of our dukes, who, being Scotch, could argue about
politics, and therefore stood out as a great brain among our
aristocrats. And what, if you please, was his grace's favorite
historical episode, which he declared he never read without
intense satisfaction? Why, the young General Bonapart's pounding