And here were these freemen assembled in the early morning to work on
their lord the bishop's road three days each -- gratis; every head of a
family, and every son of a family, three days each, gratis, and a day or
so added for their servants. Why, it was like reading about France and
the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which
swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of
blood -- one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half
a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow
tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of
wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in
hell. There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it
and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in
heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a
thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the
other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the
"horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak;
whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with
lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break?
What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the
stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief
Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and
mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by
that older and real Terror -- that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror
which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it
deserves.
-- Mark Twain
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