is' defenders were there
and asked to be heard; they were admitted to the honours of the
sitting. At eleven o'clock the weary business of thirty-seven hours
was ended, only, however, to be resumed the next morning, for yet
another vote must decide between delay or summary execution. Again the
voice of Paine was heard pleading for mercy, but without avail. At
three o'clock on Sunday morning the final voting was over. Six hundred
and ninety members were present, of whom three hundred and eighty
voted for death within twenty-four hours.

To the guillotine on the fatal Place de la Revolution, formerly Place
Louis XV., the very scene of a terrible panic at his wedding
festivities which cost the lives of hundreds of sightseers, the
sixteenth Louis of France was led on the morning of 21st January 1793.
As he turned to address the people, Santerre ordered the drums to
beat--it was the echo of the drums reverberating through history which
had smothered the cries of the Protestant martyrs sent to the scaffold
by the fourteenth Louis a century before. This was the beginning of
that _annee terrible_, into which was crowded the most stupendous
struggle in modern history. Threatened by the monarchies of Europe,
united to crush the Revolution, France, in the tremendous words of
Danton, flung to the coalesced kings, the head of a king as a gage of
battle. A colossal energy, an unquenchable devotion were evoked by the
supreme crisis, and directed by a committee of nine inexperienced
young civilians, sitting in a room of the Tuileries at Paris, to whom
later Carnot, an engineer officer, was added. "The whole Republic,"
they proclaimed, "is a great besieged city: let France be a vast camp.
Every age is called to defend the liberty of the Fatherland. The
young men will fight: the married will forge arms. Women will make
clothes and tents: children will tear old linen for lint. Old men
shall be carried to the market-place to inflame the courage of all."
In twenty-four hours, 60,000 men were enrolled; in two months,
fourteen armies organised. Saltpetre for powder failed; it was torn
from the bowels of the earth. Steel, too, and bronze were lacking:
iron railings were transmuted into swords, and church bells and royal
statues into cannon. Paris became a vast armourer's shop. Smithy fires
in hundreds roared and anvils clanged in the open places--one hundred
and forty at the Invalides, fifty-four at the Luxembourg. The women
sang as they worke