All the blood-letting was represented as a harmless affair, tending toward liberty and equality; all the confiscations of church-lands and redistribution among the peasants was declared a "great" political triumph. Throughout even the loneliest country districts the word was passed that the political millennium was about to break. ¶ The King was represented as a "monster fattening on crime." His wife was called an Austrian "panthress," and vile pamphlets were secretly passed around reflecting on her character. God was represented as judging the King, and the guillotine was awaiting Louis, by Heaven's decree. ¶ The 26,000 priests who refused to take the oath of allegiance to the monstrous political farce were visited with all manner of persecutions; one section of Revolutionary opinion decreed that death was the just due of all offending pastors. ¶ The assertion of kept-historians that there was "political justification" is at once spurious and an insult to common sense. ¶ In justice to the better French element it is granted freely that the dreadful September massacres did not express the real beliefs of the great decent body of the French people; but the Nation was dragged through the mire and the Nation has for years been endeavoring to explain this political Millennium of riots, murders, midnight assassinations, despoilings of land titles. * * * * * ¶ Bismarck would have drained the poison cup rather than stand for such French Constitutional nonsense in his beloved Germany, the Germany of his dreams, the Germany for which he labored so many years, the Germany which he would save from itself, so to speak. He purposed to build up German political opinion, not through blatherskite ward-heelers, in Berlin, Frankfort or Hamburg, but by a manly appeal to German common sense and German sense of respect for authority; and if Bismarck overworked his idea of Divine-right of kings, then at least this may be said: that he issued no appeal to the German people "Who Laughs on Friday, Weeps on Sunday!" (The massacres had come between!) And as to Danton, who glories in being the immediate instigator of the massacres we have these, Danton's own words: "It was I who caused them. Rivers of blood had to flow between me and our enemies!" Finally, after these rivers of blood, the word was passed, "That the entire Nation will hasten to adopt this (guillotine) most-necessary means of public salvation." 28 Viewing at closer range the work of the legislators of the great republic of liberty and equality; these facts Bismarck well knew, explaining his belief in militarism.