Page:Note of an English republican on the Muscovite crusade (IA noteofenglishrep00swiniala).pdf/25

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of imperial saviours, and of redeemers whose crosses were for any sufferer but themselves. We have had time enough and overmuch wherein to unlearn all belief in the tender mercies of the wicked, in the precious balms which break men's heads. We will invoke no Czar to deliver us or any man on earth by the memory of Peter the murderer of his son, of Catherine the murderess of her husband, of Alexander who was crowned and anointed by the grace and consecration of hands which had murdered his father. However 'good and even noble an element in Europe' may be the presence and influence of such a royal house, of such a House of Atreus as this, we will have none of its benefits. We have no need to inquire with Cassandra to what manner of threshold the Destroyer has led us as a guide, when we like her snuff up from within it the reeking savours of a slaughterhouse in which the internecine form of murder is by far the least criminal or horrible—if indeed it be not the one only tradition or heirloom of the family which cannot with any show of justice be called pernicious. Were we minded for once, in defiance alike of secular and of sacred warning, to put our trust at all in princes, we could hardly even so be mad enough to begin with such as these. And with these, and not with the Russian people as with an educated and adult nation of free and valiant and worthy men, men fit to grow up into citizens and unfit to be cut down into slaves—with these and with their hereditary policy it is, that in the names of justice which they know not and mercy which they abhor, in the