The moving, the lacerating thing is the fashion after which such a reading of the native elements, once adopted, has been as a light flaring into every obscurest retreat, as well as upon any puzzling ambiguity, of the state of shock of the national character under the infamy of the outrage put upon it. That _they_, of all people the most given over to local and patriarchal beatitude among the admirable and the cherished objects handed down to them by their so interesting history on every spot where its action has been thickest--that is, on every inch, so to speak, of their teeming territory--should find themselves identified with the most shamelessly cynical public act of which the civilised world at this hour retains the memory, is a fact truly representing the exquisite in the horrible; so peculiarly addressed has been their fate to the desecration of ideals that had fairly become breath of their lungs and flesh of their flesh. Oh, the installed and ensconced, the immemorially edified and arranged, the thoroughly furnished and provided and nourished people!--not in the least besotted or relaxed in their security and density, like the self-smothered society of the ancient world upon which the earlier Huns and Vandals poured down, but candidly complacent and admirably intelligent in their care for their living tradition, and only so off their guard as to have consciously set the example of this care to all such as had once smoked with them their wondrous pipe of peace. Almost any posture of stupefaction would have been conceivable in the shaken victims of this delusion: I can speak best, however, but of what I have already glanced at, that temperamental weight of their fall which has again and again, at sight of many of them gathered together, made the considering heart as heavy for them as if it, too, had for the time been worsted.