ught power, but that he sought it in the
interests of a coarse, brutal, and essentially unmeaning personal
ambition. And so of Robespierre. We need not discuss the charge that he
sought to make himself master. The important thing is that his mastery
could have served no great end for France; that it would have been like
himself, poor, barren, and hopelessly mediocre. And this would have been
seen on every side. France had important military tasks to perform
before her independence was assured. Robespierre hated war, and was
jealous of every victory. France was in urgent need of stable
government, of new laws, of ordered institutions. Robespierre never said
a word to indicate that he had a single positive idea in his head on any
of these great departments. And, more than this, he was incapable of
making use of men who were more happily endowed than himself. He had
never mastered that excellent observation of De Retz, that of all the
qualities of a good party chief, none is so indispensable as being able
to suppress on many occasions, and to hide on all, even legitimate
suspicions. He was corroded by suspicion, and this paralyses able
servants. Finally, Robespierre had no imperial quality of soul, but only
that very sorry imitation of it, a lively irritability.

The base of Robespierre's schemes of social reconstruction now came
clearly into view; and what a base! An official Supreme Being, and a
regulated Terror. The one was to fill up the spiritual void, and the
other to satisfy all the exigencies of temporal things. It is to the
credit of Robespierre's perspicacity that he should have recognised the
human craving for religion, but this credit is as naught when we
contemplate the jejune thing that passed for religion in his dim and
narrow understanding. Rousseau had brought a new soul into the
eighteenth century by the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith, the most
fervid and exalted expression of emotional deism that religious
literature contains; vague, irrational, incoherent, cloudy; but the
clouds are suffused with glowing gold. When we turn from that to the
political version of it in Robespierre's discourse on the relations of
religious and moral ideas with republican principles, we feel as one who
revisits a landscape that had been made glorious to him by a summer sky
and fresh liquid winds from the gates of the evening sun, only to find
it dead under a gray heaven and harsh blasts from the northeast.
Robespierre'