Note 58 — LECTURE.

In the melancholy history of war, this is remarked as the earliest instance of bombarding a town. Sismondi, who never fails to regard the past in the light of humanity, remarks, that "Louis the Fourteenth was the first to put in practice the atrocious method, newly invented, of bombarding towns,—of burning them, not to take them, but to destroy them,—of attacking, not fortifications, but private houses, not soldiers, but peaceable inhabitants, women and children,—and of confounding thousands of private crimes, each one of which would cause horror, in one great public crime, one great disaster, which he regarded only as one of the catastrophes of war." (Histoire des Français, Tom. XXV. p. 452.) How much of this is justly applicable to the recent sacrifice of women and children by forces of the United States at Vera Cruz! Algiers was bombarded in the cause of freedom; Vera Cruz, to extend slavery!