AMERICAN PROBLEMS by WILLIAM E.BORAH 1924

234 WILLIAM E. BORAH
too, than Russia in its most distressed period
but that time has passed now. That period has
gone by, and order has come out of chaos, and
we are in a very much more advantageous position
from every standpoint to recognize Russia
than Washington and Hamilton and Jefferson
were upon the 19th of April, 1793, with
reference to France.
May I read a single paragraph in description
of the Government and the conditions in
France at the time it was recognized? ^This is
from Macaulay:
Then came those days when the most barbarous of all
codes was administered by the most barbarous of all tribunals;
when no man could greet his neighbors or say his
prayers or dress his hair without danger of committing
a capital crime ; when spies lurked in every corner ; when
the guillotine was long and hard at work every morning
when the jails were filled as close as the hold of a slave
ship; when the gutters ran foaming with blood into the
Seine; when it was death to be great-niece of a captain
of the royal guards or half brother of a doctor of the
Sorbonne, to express a doubt whether assignats would not
fall, to hint that the English had been victorious in the
action of the 1st of June, to have a copy of one of Burke's
pamphlets locked up in a desk, to laugh at Jacobin for
taking the name of Cassius or Timoleon, or to call the
Fifth Sans-culottide by its old superstitious name of St.
Matthew's Day. While the daily wagon loads of victims
were carried to their doom through the streets of Paris,
the proconsuls whom the sovereign committee had sent