[58] In the melancholy history of war, this is remarked as the earliest instance of _bombarding_ a town. Sismondi, who never fails to regard the past in the light of humanity, remarks, that "Louis the Fourteenth was the first to put in practice the atrocious method, newly invented, of bombarding towns,--of burning them, not to take them, but to destroy them,--_of attacking, not fortifications, but private houses, not soldiers, but peaceable inhabitants, women and children,--and of confounding thousands of private crimes, each one of which would cause horror, in one great public crime, one great disaster, which he regarded only as one of the catastrophes of war_." (Histoire des Français, Tom. XXV. p. 452.) How much of this is justly applicable to the recent sacrifice of women and children by forces of the United States at Vera Cruz! Algiers was bombarded in the cause of _freedom_; Vera Cruz, to extend _slavery_! [59] Siècle de Louis XIV., Chap. XIV. An unhappy incident is mentioned by the historian, which attests how little the French at that time, even while engaged in securing the redemption of their own countrymen, cared for the cause of general freedom. An officer of the triumphant fleet, receiving the Christian slaves surrendered to him, observed among them many English, who, with national vainglory, maintained that they were set at liberty out of regard to the king of England. At once the Frenchman summoned the Algerines, and, returning the foolish captives into their hands, said: "These people pretend that they have been delivered in the name of their monarch. Mine does not take the liberty to offer them his protection. I return them to you. It is for you to show what you owe to the king of England."[60] The Englishmen were hurried again to prolonged slavery. The power of Charles the Second was impotent in their behalf, as was the sense of justice and humanity in the French officer or the Algerine slave-masters. [60] Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV., Chap. XIV. I cannot pause to develop the course of other efforts by France; nor can I dwell upon the determined conduct of Holland, one of whose greatest naval commanders, Admiral de Ruyter, in 1661, enforced at Algiers the emancipation of several hundred Christian slaves.[61] The inconsistency which we have before remarked appears also in these two powers. Both, while using their best endeavors for the freedom of their white people, were cruelly engaged selling blacks into distant American slavery,--as if every word of reprobation fastened upon the piratical, slave-driving Algerines did not return in eternal judgment against themselves. [61] Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. XVIII. p. 441. REDEMPTION OF WHITE SLAVES.