g the country in
danger, and on the 22nd it was proclaimed, to the sound of cannon. It
was a call to arms, and placed dictatorial power in the hands of
government. Different plans were proposed to keep that power distinct
from the executive, and the idea which afterwards developed into the
Committee of Public Safety now began to be familiar. On July 14 the
anniversary of the Bastille and of the Federation of 1790 was
celebrated on the Champ de Mars; the king went up to the altar, where
he swore fidelity to the Constitution, with a heavy heart; and the
people saw him in public for the last time until they saw him on the
scaffold. It was near the end of July when the Girondins saw that the
king would not take them back, and that the risk of a Jacobin
insurrection, as much against them as against the throne, was fast
approaching. Their last card was a regency, to be directed by them in
the name of the Dauphin. Vergniaud suggested that the king should
summon four conspicuous members of the Constituent Assembly to his
Council, without office, to make up for the obscurity of his new
ministers. At that moment Brunswick's declaration became known, some
of the forty-eight sections in which the people of Paris deliberated
demanded the dethronement of the king, and the Marseillais, arriving
on the 30th, five or six hundred strong, made it possible to
accomplish it.

These events, coinciding almost to a day, conveyed power from the
Assembly to the municipality, and from the Girondins to the Jacobins,
who had the municipality in their hands, and held the machinery that
worked the sections. In a letter written to be laid before the king,
Vergniaud affirmed that it was impossible to dissociate him from the
allies who were in arms for his sake, and whose success would be so
favourable to his authority. That was the argument to which no
royalist could reply. The country was in danger, and the cause of the
danger was the king. The Constitution had broken down on June 20. The
king could not devote himself to the maintenance of a system which
exposed him to such treatment, and enabled his adversaries to dispose
of all forces in a way that left him at the mercy of the most
insolent and the most infamous of the rabble. He had not the instincts
of a despot, and would easily have been made content with reasonable
amendments. But the limit of the changes he sought was unknown,
unsettled, unexplained, and he was identified simply with the rever