Why should 'horrors' have been committed at Arras in 1789? The contemporary documents show that the people in and about Arras were much better off in 1789 than they had ever before been. The renting value of farms about Arras was nearly or quite thirty per cent. higher in 1750 than it had been in 1700, and it was nearly or quite 100 per cent. higher in 1800 than in 1750. M. de Calonne cites a farm which had brought only 1,800 livres in 1714 as bringing, in 1784, 3,800 livres. Men paid these advanced prices not for the ownership of the land, which before 1789 carried with it certain social distinctions and advantages, but for the use, the productive and commercial use, of the land. The horrors of which General Dalrymple spoke, at Arras as elsewhere throughout France--here, in the Laonnais and the Soissonnais, in Provence, in Normandy, in Languedoc--were perpetrated not by a downtrodden peasantry, rising to shake off oppression, nor yet in the frenzy of a great popular rally to resist a foreign invader. They were an outburst of crime stimulated, no doubt, as we are now enabled, by fearless and conscientious investigators of the documentary history of France, to see, by cabals of political conspirators at Paris, just as the Gordon riots at London in 1780 were stimulated by anti-Catholic fanatics. But in both cases the perpetrators were governed by the mere lust of pillage and destruction. Chateaux were broken into, sacked, and burned here in the Laonnais and the Soissonnais, as Lord Mansfield's house was broken into, sacked, and burned in London, because they were full of valuables to be looted. As the drama went on, other passions came into play--passions not less but more ignoble than the mere savage lust of plunder and destruction. A branded rogue and libeller, Brissot, hurried back from his exile beyond the Atlantic to compete with Camille Desmoulins in that noble work of 'denouncing' his fellow-citizens, which earned for Camille the ghastly title of '_procureur de la lanterne_.' Madame Roland, 'the soul of the Gironde,' sustained, inspired, and animated that most mischievous group with all the concentrated fires of envy, jealousy, and revenge, which had smouldered in her own heart from the time when, as a girl of seventeen, she had passed a week 'in the garrets' of the palace at Versailles with Madame Le Grand, one of the tirewomen of the Dauphiness. The firmness with which Madame Roland met her own fate on the scaffold has been sufficiently celebrated in poetry and in prose. But it is wholesome also to remember the ferocity with which, in the 'glorious' month of July, 1789, a fortnight after the capture of the Bastille, she clamoured for the blood of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. In 1771 Marie Phlipon, the engraver's daughter, a girl of seventeen, educated, as her own Memoirs tell us, on 'Candide,' the 'Confessions of Rousseau,' and the 'Adventures of the Chevalier de Faublas,' came away from Versailles so gangrened with envy of the