| Children shot | 500 |
| Children drowned | 1500 |
| Women shot | 264 |
| Women drowned | 500 |
| Priests shot and drowned | 760 |
| Nobles drowned | 1400 |
| Artisans drowned | 5300 |
The whole number destroyed at Nantz, of which the above is a portion only, was thirty-two thousand.
To these add those slaughtered in the wars of La Vendée, viz., nine hundred thousand men, fifteen thousand women, and twenty-two thousand children. To this add the victims at Lyons, numbering thirty-one thousand. To this, add those who are recorded thus: “women who died of grief, or premature childbirth, three thousand seven hundred;” and we have a sum-total of one million twenty-two thousand human beings destroyed by violence. How many should be added, as those who died of prison sufferings, or from the pangs and privations of exile, or from famine and from pestilence consequent on this state of anarchy and violence, who can enumerate?
At some periods, such was the awful slaughter, that the rivers were discoloured with blood. In Paris, a vast aqueduct was dug to carry off the gore to the Seine, and four men employed in conducting it to this reservoir. In the river Loire, the corpses accumulated so that birds of prey hovered all along its banks, the waters became infected, and the fishes so poisonous that the magistrates of Nantz forbade the fishermen to take them.
Thus, in the language of another, “France became a kind of suburb of the world of perdition. Surrounding nations were lost in amazement as they beheld the scene. It seemed a prelude to the funeral of this great world, a stall of death, a den into which thousands daily entered and none were seen to return. Between ninety and a hundred of the leaders in this mighty work of death, fell by the hand of violence. Enemies to all men, they were of course enemies to each other. Butchers of the human race, they soon whetted the knife for each other’s throats; and the same Almighty Being who rules the universe, whose existence they had denied by a solemn act of legislation, whose perfections they had made the butt of public scorn, whose Son they had crucified afresh, and whose Word they had burned by the hands of a common hangman, swept them all, by the hand of violence, into an untimely grave. The tale made every ear that heard it tingle, and every heart chill with horror. It was, in the language of Ossian, ‘the song of death.’ It was like the reign of the plague in a populous city. Knell tolled upon knell, hearse followed hearse, coffin rumbled after coffin, without a mourner to shed a tear, or a solitary attendant to mark the place of the grave. ‘From one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, the world went forth and looked upon the carcasses of the men who transgressed against God, and they were an abhorring unto all flesh.’”
Such, my countrywomen, are the scenes which have been enacted in this very age, in a land calling itself Christian, and boasting itself as at the head of civilization and refinement. Do you say that such cruelty and bloodthirsty rage can never appear among us; that our countrymen can never be so deluded by falsehood and blinded by passion?
Look, then, at scenes which have already occurred in our land. Look at Baltimore: it is night, and within one of its prisons are shut up some of its most excellent and respected citizens. They dared to use the rights of free-men, and express their opinions, and oppose the measures of the majority; and for this, a fierce multitude is raging around those walls, demanding their blood. They force the doors, and, with murderous weapons, reach the room containing their victims. Some friendly hand extinguishes the lights, and in the protecting darkness they seek to escape. Some succeed; others are recognised, and seized, and stabbed, and trampled on, and dragged around in murderous fury. One of the noblest of these victims, apparently dead, is seized by some pitying neighbour, under the pretence of cruelty, and thrown into the river and carried over a fall. There he is drawn forth and restored to consciousness; and there, too, it is discovered, that by Americans, by the hands of his fellow-citizens, his body has been stuck with scores of pins, deep plunged into his flesh!
Look, again, at the Southwest, and see gamblers swinging uncondemned from a gallows, and among them a harmless man, whom the fury of the mob hung up without time for judge or jury to detect his innocence.
See, on the banks of the Mississippi, fires blazing, and American citizens roasted alive by their fellow-citizens! See, even in New-England, the boasted land of law and steady habits, a raging mob besets a house filled with women and young children. They set fire to it, and the helpless inmates are driven forth by the flames to the sole protection of darkness and the pitiless ruffians. See, in Cincinnati, the poor blacks driven from their homes, insulted, beaten, pillaged, seeking refuge in prisons and private houses, and for days kept in constant terror and peril.