Even to-day the old poison has not lost its power. This very morning I
heard under my window loud and shrill voices. I looked out and saw a
group of brown and ragged women, with babies in their arms, discussing
the news from Madrid. The Protestants, they said, had begun to steal
Catholic children. They talked themselves into a fury. Their elf-locks
hung about their fierce black eyes. The sinews of their lean necks
worked tensely in their voluble rage. Had they seen our mild missionary
at that moment, whom all men respect and all children instinctively
love, they would have torn him in pieces in their Maenad fury, and would
have thought they were doing their duty as mothers and Catholics.
This absurd and devilish charge was seriously made in a Madrid journal,
the organ of the Moderates, and caused great fermentation for several
days, street rows, and debates in the Cortes, before the excitement died
away. Last summer, in the old Murcian town of Lorca, an English
gentleman, who had been several weeks in the place, was attacked and
nearly killed by a mob, who insisted that he was engaged in the business
of stealing children, and using their spinal marrow for lubricating
telegraph wires! What a picture of blind and savage ignorance is here
presented! It reminds us of that sad and pitiful "blood-bath revolt" of
Paris, where the wretched mob rose against the wretched tyrant Louis
XV., accusing him of bathing in the blood of children to restore his own
wasted and corrupted energies.
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