creature, and still have a faculty for mischief. And
Robespierre had this faculty in the case of Danton. With singular
baseness, he handed over to Saint Just a collection of notes, to serve
as material for the indictment which Saint Just was to present to the
Convention. They comprised everything that suspicion could interpret
malignantly, from the most conspicuous acts of Danton's public life,
down to the casual freedom of private discourse.

Another infamy was to follow. After the arrest, and on the proceedings
to obtain the assent of the Convention to the trial of Danton and others
of its members, one only of their friends had the courage to rise and
demand that they should be heard at the bar. Robespierre burst out in
cold rage; he asked whether they had undergone so many heroic
sacrifices, counting among them these acts of 'painful severity,' only
to fall under the yoke of a band of domineering intriguers; and he cried
out impatiently that they would brook no claim of privilege, and suffer
no rotten idol. The word was felicitously chosen, for the Convention
dreaded to have its independence suspected, and it dreaded this all the
more because at this time its independence did not really exist. The
vote against Danton was unanimous, and the fact that it was so is the
deepest stain on the fame of this assembly. On the afternoon of the
Sixteenth Germinal (April 5, 1794) Paris in amazement and some
stupefaction saw the once-dreaded Titan of the Mountain fast bound in
the tumbril, and faring towards the sharp-clanging knife. 'I leave it
all in a frightful welter,' Danton is reported to have said. 'Not a man
of them has an idea of government. Robespierre will follow me; he is
dragged down by me. Ah, better be a poor fisherman than meddle with the
governing of men!'

* * * * *

Let us pause for a moment over a calmer reminiscence. This was the very
day on which the virtuous and high-minded Condorcet quitted the friendly
roof that for nine months had concealed him from the search of
proscription. The same week he was found dead in his prison. While
Danton was storming with impotent thunder before the tribunal, Condorcet
was writing those closing words of his Sketch of Human Progress, which
are always so full of strength and edification. 'How this picture of the
human race freed from all its fetters,--withdrawn from the empire of
chance, as from that of the enemies of progress, and walking wit