the
happiness and peace of all humanity. And, finally, this terrific crater
did, indeed, open and hurl destruction and death on all sides, over the
whole world, uprooting, with demoniac fury, entire races and nations,
and silencing the merry laugh and harmless jest with the overpowering
echoes of its awful voice!

This volcano was the revolution. In France, the first and most fearful
explosion of this terrific crater occurred, but the whole world shook
and heaved with it, and, on all sides, the furious masses from beneath
overflowed on the surface, seeking to reverse the order of things and
place the lowest where the highest had been. Even away in Martinique
this social earthquake was felt, which had already, in France, flung out
the bloody guillotine from its relentless crater. This guillotine had
become the altar of the so-called enfranchisement of nations, and upon
this altar the intoxicated, unthinking masses offered up to their new
idol those who, until then, had been their lords and masters, and by
whose death they now believed that they could purchase freedom
for evermore.

"_Egalite! fraternite! liberte!_" Such was the battle-cry of this
howling, murdering populace. Such were the three words which burned in
blood-red letters of fire above the guillotine, and their mocking emblem
was the glittering axe, that flashed down, to sever from their bodies
the heads of the aristocrats whom, in spite of the new religion
represented in those three words, they would not recognize as brethren
and equals, or admit to the freedom of life and of opinion. And this
battle-cry of the murderous French populace had penetrated as far as
Martinique, where it had aroused the slaves from their sullen obedience
to the point of demanding by force that participation in freedom,
equality, and brotherhood, that had so long been denied them. They, at
last, rose everywhere in open insurrection against their masters, and
the firebrands which th