ing
victims of the same cruelties, nor did it prevent women from being actors
in them.

Yet the horror of these scenes was scarcely stranger than the
pusillanimity of those who endured them unresistingly; for there were not
wanting instances of magistrates honest enough to detest, and courageous
enough to chastise, such outrages; and wherever the effort was made it
succeeded so completely as to fix no slight criminality on those who
submitted to them. In Dauphiny, the States of the province raised a small
guard, which quelled the first attempts to cause riots there, and hanged
the ringleaders. In Macon, a similar force, though not three hundred
strong, encountered a band of brigands, six thousand in number, and
brought back two hundred prisoners, the chiefs of whom were instantly
executed, and by their prompt punishment tranquillity was restored.
Similar firmness would have saved other districts, which now allowed
themselves to be the victims of ravage and murder; as afterward it would
have preserved the whole country, even when the madness and wickedness of
subsequent years were at their height; for in no part of the kingdom did
those who perpetrated or sympathized with the crimes which have made the
Revolution a by-word, approach the number of those who loathed them, but
who had not the courage or foresight to withstand them. It seemed as if a
long course of misgovernment, and the example of the profligacy and
impiety set by the higher classes for many generations, had demoralized
the entire people, some in their excesses discarding the ordinary
instincts of human beings; while the bulk of the nation had lost even that
courage which had once been among its most shining qualities, and had no
longer the manliness to resist outrages which they abhorred, even when
their own safety was staked upon their repression.

And similar weakness was exhibited in the Assembly itself; for,
unquestionably, the party which at last prevailed was not that which was
originally the strongest. Like most assemblies of the kind, it was divided
into three parties--the extreme Royalists, or "the Right;" the extreme
Reformers (who were subdivided into several sections), or "the Left;" and
between them the moderate Constitutionalists, or "the Plain," as they were
called, from occupying seats in the middle of the hall, between the raised
benches on either side. And to the last party belonged all the men most
distinguished either for statesman-lik