ent. The truth is, that Robespierre was both disliked
and despised by his colleagues. They thought of him as a mere maker of
useful phrases; he in turn secretly looked down upon them, as the man
who has a doctrine and a system in his head always looks down upon the
man who lives from hand to mouth. If the Committee had been in the place
of a government which has no opposition to fear, Robespierre would have
been one of its least powerful members. But although the government was
strong, there were at least three potent elements of opposition even
within the ranks of the dominant revolutionary party itself.

Three bodies in Paris were, each of them, the centre of an influence
that might at any moment become the triumphant rival of the Committee of
Public Safety. These bodies were, first, the Convention; second, the
Commune of Paris; and thirdly, the Jacobin Club. The jealousy thus
existing outside the Committee would have made any failure instantly
destructive. At one moment, at the end of 1793, it was only the
surrender of Toulon that saved the Committee from a hostile motion in
the Convention, and such a motion would have sent half of them to the
guillotine. They were reviled by the extreme party who ruled at the Town
Hall for not carrying the policy of extermination far enough. They were
reproached by Danton and his powerful section for carrying that policy
too far. They were discredited by the small band of intriguers, like
Bazire, who identified government with peculation. Finally, they were
haunted by the shadow of a fear, which events were by and by to prove
only too substantial, lest one of their military agents on the frontier
should make himself their master. The key to the struggle of the
factions between the winter of 1793 and the revolution of the summer of
1794 is the vigorous resolve of the governing Committees not to part
with power. The drama is one of the most exciting in the history of
faction; it abounds in rapid turns and unexpected shifts, upon which the
student may spend many a day and many a night, and after all he is
forced to leave off in despair of threading an accurate way through the
labyrinth of passion and intrigue. The broad traits of the situation,
however, are tolerably simple. The difficulty was to find a principle of
government which the people could be induced to accept. 'The rights of
men and the new principles of liberty and equality,' Burke said, 'were
very unhandy instruments for th