< Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf
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VICTOR HUGO:

23rd of April he wrote from Brussels, where the care of his fatherless grandchildren for the time detained him, a letter to the Rappel, suppressed in their deaf and blind insanity by men who would not hear and could not see; in this letter he traced with the keen fidelity of science the disease to its head, and with the direct intelligence, of simple reason tracked the torrent of civil war to its source; to the action of the majority, inspired by the terror and ignorance which ere long were to impel them to the conception and perpetration of even greater crimes than they had already provoked from the ignorance and passion of their antagonists. Above all, his faithful and fearless voice was raised before both parties alike against the accursed principle of reprisals. Now as of old, as ever throughout his life of glory and of good, he called upon justice by her other name of mercy; he claimed for all alike the equity of compassion; he stood up to plead for all his enemies, for all the enemies of his cause—to repudiate for himself and his fellow-sufferers of past time the use of such means as had been used against themselves—of banishment, imprisonment, lifelong proscription, murder in the mass or in detail. But the plague was not so to be stayed; and when the restored government had set itself steadily to outdo in cold blood the crimes of the conquered populace in its agony, the mighty voice which had appealed in vain against the assassins and incendiaries whose deeds had covered with just or unjust dishonour the name of the fallen party, who had confused in the sight of Europe their own evil works with the noble dreams and deeds of better men, and sullied with the fumes of blood and fire the once sublime and stainless

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