that they also knew that he was an aristocrat in disguise.
So when this defection of Dumouriez came, and was shared by his own
son, he tried to get out of the country. He was arrested at
Marseilles, brought to the Conciergerie, that half-way house to the
scaffold, and was soon following in the footsteps of his king and
queen, through the Rue St. Honore, passing his own Palais Royal on his
way to the Place de la Revolution.

The Revolution, beginning with a patriotic assembly, in a measure sane,
had made a rapid descent, first falling apart into Girondist and
Jacobin, moderate and extremist, the Girondist with a shudder
consenting to the execution of the king. Then, the power passing to a
so-called "Committee of Public Safety" and a Triumvirate, in order to
sweep away the obstructive Girondist; and then an untrammelled Terror,
in the hands of three, and, finally, one. Such had been its mad
course. But with the death of the king and queen, the madness had
reached its height, and a revulsion of feeling set in. There was a
surfeit of blood, and an awakening sense of horror, which turned upon
the instigators. Danton fell, and finally, when amid cries of "Death
to the tyrant!" Robespierre was dragged wounded and shivering to the
fate he had brought upon so many thousands, the drama which had opened
at the Bastille was fittingly closed.

The great battle for human liberty had been fought and won. Religious
freedom and political freedom were identical in principle. The right
of the human conscience, proclaimed by Luther in 1517, had in 1793 only
expanded into the large conception of all the inherent rights of the
_individual_.

It had taken centuries for English persistence to accomplish what
France, with such appalling violence, had done in as many years. It
had been a furious outburst of pent-up force; but the work had been
thorough. Not a germ of tyranny remained. The incrustations of a
thousand years were not alone broken, but pulverized; the privileged
classes were swept away, and their vast estates, two-thirds of the
territory of France, ready to be distributed among the rightful owners
of the soil, those who by toil and industry could win them. France was
as new as if she had no history. There was ample opportunity for her
people now. What would they do with it?

What would they build upon the ruins of their ancient despotism? What
would be the starting-point for such a task--every connecting link with