Are we more enlightened and humane than the barefoot priest who cuts the throat of the sacrificial lamb in hopes that the evil earned by men may be turned aside upon that innocent victim?

Is it any more likely that the diseases earned by the eating of poisoned and half spoiled meat, and devitalized flour, and many over rich dishes, and by disobedience to the natural laws of health, will be turned aside upon the victims of the laboratory, than that our sins may be redeemed by the slaughter of a goat?

Are not cruelty and the infliction of suffering infallible marks of barbarism, and are not civilizations measured by sympathy, understanding and greatness of heart of their leaders, rather than by the strength of their weapons or the record of their murders?

And what of all this struggle and fear and hatred and bloody agony? Has it no recoil in the metaphysical worlds; no effect upon that nexus of causation which we call the destiny of men and nations?

When we read of the centuries of oppression, exploitation, spoliation, violation and torture which the French serfs and peasants suffered at the hands of the arrogant and selfish nobles, we are inclined to feel that the horrors of the French Revolution were an inevitable reaction, a sort of restoration of an upset balance, a compensating swing of nature’s pendulum. Even though the individuals who perpetrated the ancient atrocities seem to have escaped their merited retribution, we have a feeling that nations and classes must in the long run pay the piper, and we can almost weigh the dreadful murder of the innocent Princesse de Lambelle against the patent of nobility which gave a French count the privilege of warming his feet, if they were cold, in the palpitating entrails of a serf.

Looked at from this Emersonian angle, the excesses of the Russian revolution seem but links in the chain forged by the outrages and cruelties of a thousand years, inflicted upon the people by the Grand Dukes and their lesser vassals; and the