versaries may fairly thank him now for teaching them that word: in Hotspur's fashion they holloa "blood-guilty" in his ears when he lies asleep; they keep his chagrin still in motion by starlings which can twitter "blood-guiltiness." How he must sicken at the sound!
It is a capital misfortune to this babbling personage that, with presumptuous self-righteousness, he delights to denounce in the eyes of others motes which, in his own eye bloated to hideous beams, may shortly astonish and disgust beholders. To him, of all men living, is applicable the reproof, "Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things." Ay, the same things, but sixty or a hundred fold in quantity, notorious for their wantonness and injustice; in many cases blackened by basest accompaniments. This man is par excellence the blood-guilty. There has not been for a generation any man standing where he now stands that has shed blood so profusely or so wantonly. Deficient of all the qualities which fit a man for active life, he has, through natural squeamishness at vigorous operations, through procrastinations, through want of clear purposes, – drifted into a sea of blood. And, unhappily, all the blood that he has shed has flowed to no purpose, for his bloody work is yet to do. He is still hurrying forward his victims, for we know not what object – still glutting the maw of death, because he knows no more of dealing with the forward and the bold than a woman or a monk.[1]
But if we pass from the consideration of the word "blood-guiltiness" to that of the occasion where it was used by David, we discover that the recoil upon the head of the canter has been a hundred times more crushing than is apparent to casual observation. David used the word in the agony of his contrition, after Nathan the prophet had been with him and said, "Thou art the man." His conscience told him that he had been guilty, not of blood only, but of the most treacherous and dastardly murder. He had given directions like this concerning one of his chief officers, a man of loyalty and devotion: "Set ye him in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten and die." These words so nearly describe the desertion and treachery which have recently stirred the whole British empire, that one cannot but think the most evil of evil geniuses was dominant on the day when this canting spirit went grubbing in the 51st Psalm for a stone to fling at his political opponents. The shot has recoiled with a fearful vengeance.
Not to dwell longer on this supreme instance, we may glance over the career through the last five years of the cant-loving pretender, and perceive that the efflux of unctuous phrases to which he condescended in 1880 has been weighing him down ever since, binding him hand and foot, crippling his action, restraining his speech, and yet that, despite his vacillation, his timid ventures, and his mealy mouth, he has plunged so deeply into blood, crime, and failure, that history must show him as a truly unhappy figure. Whatever he has denounced in others, that thing he has done with in-
- ↑ Napoleon wrote to his sister Caroline that her husband, Murat, had no more brains than a woman, and was weaker than a monk.
