His absence during the final crisis of the anarchic party allowed events
to ripen, without committing him to that initiative in dangerous action
which he had dreaded on the Tenth of August, as he dreaded it on every
other decisive day of this burning time. The party of the Commune
became more and more daring in their invectives against the Convention
and the Committees. At length they proclaimed open insurrection. But
Paris was cold, and opinion was divided. In the night of the Thirteenth
of March, Hebert, Chaumette, Clootz, were arrested. The next day
Robespierre recovered sufficiently to appear at the Jacobin Club. He
joined his colleagues of the Committee of Public Safety in striking the
blow. On the Twenty-fourth of March the Ultra-Revolutionist leaders were
beheaded.

The first bloody breach in the Jacobin ranks was speedily followed by
the second. The Right wing of the opposition to the Committee soon
followed the Left down the ways to dusty death, and the execution of the
Anarchists only preceded by a week the arrest of the Moderates. When the
seizure of Danton had once before been discussed in the Committee,
Robespierre resisted the proposal violently. We have already seen how he
defended Danton at the Jacobin Club, when the Club underwent the process
of purification in the winter. What produced this sudden tack? How came
Robespierre to assent in March to a violence which he had angrily
discountenanced in February? There had been no change in the policy or
attitude of Danton himself. The military operations against the domestic
and foreign enemies were no sooner fairly in the way of success, than
Danton began to meditate in serious earnest the consolidation of a
republican system of law and justice. He would fain have stayed the
Terror. 'Let us leave something,' he said, 'to the guillotine of
opinion.' He aided, no doubt, in the formation of the Revolutionary
Tribunal, but this was exactly in harmony with his usual policy of
controlling popular violence without alienating the strength of popular
sympathy. The process of the tribunal was rough and summary, but it was
fairer--until Robespierre's Law of Prairial--than people usually
suppose, and it was the very temple of the goddess of Justice herself
compared with the September massacres. 'Let us prove ourselves
terrible,' Danton said, 'to relieve the people from the necessity of
being so.' His activity had been incessant in urging and superintending
the great le