Retribution in another form has already visited France; nor is its terrible vengeance yet spent. Not only are populous cities, all throbbing with life and filled with innocent households, subjected to siege, but to bombardment also,--being that most ruthless trial of war, where non-combatants, including women and children, sick and aged, share with the soldier his peculiar perils, and suffer alike with him. All are equal before the hideous shell, crashing, bursting, destroying, killing, and changing the fairest scene into blood-spattered wreck. Against its vengeful, slaughterous descent there is no protection for the people,--nothing but an uncertain shelter in cellars, or, it may be, in the common sewers. Already Strasbourg, Toul, and Metz have been called to endure this indiscriminate massacre, where there is no distinction of persons; and now the same fate is threatened to Paris the Beautiful, with its thronging population counted by the million. Thus is the ancient chalice which France handed to others now commended to her own lips. It was France that first in history adopted this method of war. Long ago, under Louis the Fourteenth, it became a favorite; but it has not escaped the judgment of history. Voltaire, with elegant pen, records that “this art, carried soon among other nations, served only to multiply human calamities, and more than once was dreadful to France, where it was invented.”[208] The bombardment of Luxembourg in 1683 drew from Sismondi, always humane and refined, words applicable to recent events. “Louis the Fourteenth,” he says, “had been the first to put in practice this atrocious and newly invented method of bombarding towns, … 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 as nothing more than one of the catastrophes of war.”[209] Again is the saying fulfilled, “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” No lapse of time can avert the inexorable law. Macbeth saw it in his terrible imaginings, when he said,-- “But in these cases We still have judgment here,--that we but teach Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return To plague the inventor.” And what instruction more bloody than the bombardment of a city, which now returns to plague the French people? Thus is history something more even than philosophy teaching by example; it is sermon with argument and exhortation. The simple record of nations preaches; and whether you regard reason or the affections, it is the same. If nations were wise or humane, they would not fight. PEACE AFTER CAPITULATION AT SEDAN.