haps, while they determined to establish their faction by "braving
all Europe," they might think it equally politic to perplex and overawe
Paris by a near and dangerous enemy, which would render their continuance
in power necessary, or whom they might join, if expelled from it.*

* This last reason might afterwards have given way to their
apprehensions, and the Brissotins have preferred the creation of new
civil wars, to a confidence in the royalists. These men, who
condemned the King for a supposed intention of defending an
authority transmitted to him through whole ages, and recently
sanctioned by the voice of the people, did not scruple to excite a
civil war in defence of their six months' sovereignty over a
republic, proclaimed by a ferocious comedian, and certainly without
the assent of the nation. Had the ill-fated Monarch dared thus to
trifle with the lives of his subjects, he might have saved France
and himself from ruin.

When men gratify their ambition by means so sanguinary and atrocious as
those resorted to by the Brissotines, we are authorized in concluding
they will not be more scrupulous in the use or preservation of power,
than they were in attaining it; and we can have no doubt but that the
fomenting or suppressing the progress of civil discord, was, with them,
a mere question of expediency.

The decree which took place in March, 1793, for raising three hundred
thousand men in the departments, changed the partial insurrections of La
Vendee to an open and connected rebellion; and every where the young
people refused going, and joined in preference the standard of revolt.
In the beginning of the summer, the brigands* (as they were called) grew
so numerous, that the government, now in the hands of Robespierre and his
party, began to take serious measures to combat them.

* Robbers--_banditti_--The name was first given, probably, to the
insurgents of La Vendee, in order to insinuate a belief that the
disorders were but of a slight and predatory nature.

--One body of troops were dispatched after another, who were all
successively defeated, and every where fled before the royalists.

It is not unusual in political concerns to attribute to deep-laid plans
and abstruse combinations, effects which are the natural result of
private passions and isolated interests. Robespierre is said to have
promoted both the destruction of the republi