"THE OCEAN OVERPEERS ITS LIST"
And then all avenues were open. And like a huge flood, long damned
up, turbulent, turbid, muddy, loaded with wrecks and debris, the
gigantic mass broke loose, full of foam and terror, and flowed in
every direction. A foul and brutal and ravenous multitude it was,
dark with dust and sweat, armed with the weapons of civilization, but
possessing only the instincts of wild beasts.
At first they were under the control of some species of discipline
and moved toward the houses of the condemned, of whom printed
catalogues had been furnished the officers. The shouts, the yells,
the delight were appalling.
Now and then some poor wretch, whose sole offense was that he was
well-dressed, would take fright and start to run, and then, like
hounds after a rabbit, they would follow in full cry; and when he was
caught a hundred men would struggle to strike him, and he would
disappear in a vortex of arms, clubs and bayonets, literally torn to
pieces.
A sullen roar filled the air as this human cyclone moved onward,
leaving only wrecks behind it. Now it pauses at a house. The captain
consults his catalogue. "This is it," he cries; and doors and windows
give way before the thunderous mob; and then the scenes are terrible.
Men are flung headlong, alive, out of the windows to the ravenous
wretches below; now a dead body comes whirling down; then the
terrified inhabitants fly to the roofs, and are pursued from house to
house and butchered in sight of the delighted spectators. But when
the condemned man--the head of the house--is at last found, hidden
perhaps in some coal-hole or cellar, and is brought up, black with
dust, and wild with terror, his clothes half torn from his back; and
he is thrust forth, out of door or window, into the claws of the wild
beasts, the very heavens ring with acclamations of delight; and happy
is the man who can reach over his fellows and know that he has struck
the victim.
Then up and away for another vengeance. Before them is solitude;
shops and stores and residences are closed and barricaded; in the
distance teams are seen flying and men scurrying to shelter; and
through crevices in shutters the horrified people peer at the mob, as
at an invasion of barbarians.
Behind them are dust, confusion, dead bodies, hammered and beaten out
of all semblance of humanity; and, worse than all, the criminal
classes--that wretched and inexplicable residuum, who have no
grievance against the world except their own existence--the base, the
cowardly, the cruel, the sneaking, the inhuman, the horrible! These
flock like jackals in the track of the lions. They rob the dead
bodies; they break into houses; they kill if they are resisted; they
fill their pockets. Their joy is unbounded. Elysium has descended
upon earth for them this day. Pickpockets, sneak-thieves,
confidence-men, burglars, robbers, assassins, the refuse and
outpouring of grog-shops and brothels, all are here. And women,
too--or creatures that pass for such--having the bodies of women and
the habits of ruffians;--harpies--all claws and teeth and
greed--bold--desperate--shameless--incapable of good. They, too, are
here. They dart hither and thither; they swarm--they dance--they
howl--they chatter--they quarrel and battle, like carrion-vultures,
over the spoils.
Civilization is gone, and all the devils are loose! No more courts,
nor judges, nor constables, nor prisons! That which it took the world
ten thousand years to create has gone in an hour.
And still the thunderous cyclones move on through a hundred streets.
Occasionally a house is fired; but this is not part of the programme,
for they have decided to keep all these fine residences for
themselves! They will be rich. They will do no more work. The rich
man's daughters shall be their handmaidens; they will wear his purple
and fine linen.
But now and then the flames rise up--perhaps a thief kindles the
blaze--and it burns and burns; for who would leave the glorious work
to put it out? It burns until the streets stop it and the block is
consumed. Fortunately, or unfortunately, there is no wind to breed a
general conflagration. The storms to-day are all on earth; and the
powers of the air are looking down with hushed breath, horrified at
the exceeding wickedness of the little crawlers on the planet we call
men.
They do not, as a rule, steal. Revenge--revenge--is all their
thought. And why should they steal? Is it not all their own? Now and
then a too audacious thief is caught and stuck full of bayonets; or
he is flung out of a window, and dies at the hands of the mob the
death of the honest man for whom he is mistaken; and thus, by a
horrible travesty of fate, he perishes for that which he never was
nor could be.
Think of the disgust of a thief who finds himself being murdered for
an honest man, an aristocrat, and can get no one to believe his
asseverations that he is simply and truly a thief--and nothing more!
It is enough to make Death grin!
The rude and begrimed insurgents are raised by their terrible
purposes to a certain dignity. They are the avengers of time--the
God-sent--the righters of the world's wrongs--the punishers of the
ineffably wicked. They do not mean to destroy the world; they will
reform it--redeem it. They will make it a world where there shall be
neither toil nor oppression. But, poor fellows! their arms are more
potent for evil than their brains for good. They are omnipotent to
destroy; they are powerless to create.
But still the work of ruin and slaughter goes on. The mighty city,
with its ten million inhabitants, lies prostrate, chained, helpless,
at the mercy of the enraged _canaille_. The dogs have become lions.
The people cannot comprehend it. They look around for their
defenders--the police, the soldiery. "Where are they? Will not this
dreadful nightmare pass away?" No; no; never--never. This is the
culmination--this is the climax--"the century's aloe flowers to-day."
These are "the grapes of wrath" which God has stored up for the day
of his vengeance; and now he is trampling them out, and this is the
red juice--look you!--that flows so thick and fast in the very
gutters.
You were blind, you were callous, you were indifferent to the sorrows
of your kind. The cry of the poor did not touch you, and every
pitiful appeal wrung from human souls, every groan and sob and shriek
of men and women, and the little starving children--starving in body
and starving in brain--rose up and gathered like a great cloud around
the throne of God; and now, at last, in the fullness of time, it has
burst and comes down upon your wretched heads, a storm of
thunderbolts and blood.
You had money, you had power, you had leisure, you had intelligence,
you possessed the earth; all things were possible unto you. Did you
say to one another: "These poor souls are our brethren. For them
Christ died on Calvary. What can we do to make their lives bright and
happy?" No; no; you cried out, "'On with the dance!' Let them go down
into the bottomless pit!"
And you smiled and said to one another, in the words of the first
murderer, when he lied to God: "Am I my brother's keeper?" Nay, you
said further to one another, "There is no God!" For you thought, if
there was one, surely He would not permit the injustice manifest in
the world. But, lo! He is here. Did you think to escape him? Did you
think the great Father of Cause and Effect--the All-knowing, the
universe-building God,--would pass you by?
As you sowed, so must you reap. Evil has but one child--Death! For
hundreds of years you have nursed and nurtured Evil. Do you complain
if her monstrous progeny is here now, with sword and torch? What else
did you expect? Did you think she would breed angels?
Your ancestors, more than two centuries ago, established and
permitted Slavery. What was the cry of the bondman to them? What the
sobs of the mother torn from her child--the wife from her husband--on
the auction block? Who among them cared for the lacerated bodies, the
shameful and hopeless lives? They were merry; they sang and they
danced; and they said, "Gods sleeps."
But a day came when there was a corpse at every fireside. And not the
corpse of the black stranger--the African--the slave;--but the
corpses of fair, bright-faced men; their cultured, their manly, their
noble, their best-loved. And, North and South, they sat, rocking
themselves to and fro, in the midst of the shards and ashes of
desolation, crying aloud for the lives that would come back to bless
them never, nevermore.
God wipes out injustice with suffering; wrong with blood; sin with
death. You can no more get beyond the reach of His hand than you can
escape from the planet.