STEPS DIE OUT FOR EVER

A

long the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and

harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine.

All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since

imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation,

Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of

soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn,

which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than

those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of

shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself

into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious

license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same

fruit according to its kind.

Six tumbrils roll along the streets. Change these back again to

what they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be

seen to be the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of

feudal nobles, the toilettes of flaring Jezebels, the churches that

are not my Father’s house but dens of thieves, the huts of millions

of starving peasants! No; the great magician who majestically

works out the appointed order of the Creator, never reverses his

transformations. “If thou be changed into this shape by the will of