trous to them, because it proved their
weakness, not in numbers, but in character and counsel. Roland at once
resigned, confessing the defeat. But they stood four months before
their fall. During that memorable struggle, the question was whether
France should be ruled by violence and blood, or by men who knew the
passion for freedom. The Girondins at once raised the real issue by
demanding inquiry into the massacres of September. It was a valid but
a perilous weapon. There could be no doubt as to what those who had
committed a thousand murders to obtain power would be capable of doing
in their own defence.

The Girondins calculated badly. By leaving crime unpunished they could
have divided their adversaries. Almost to the last moment Danton
wished to avoid the conflict. Again and again they rejected his
offers. Open war, said Vergniaud, is better than a hollow truce. Their
rejection of the hand that bore the crimson stain is the cause of
their ruin, but also of their renown. They were always impolitic,
disunited, and undecided; but they rose, at times, to the level of
honest men. Their second line of attack was not better chosen. Party
politics were new, and the science of understanding the other side was
not developed; and the Girondins were persuaded that the Montagnards
were at heart royalists, aiming at the erection of an Orleanist
throne. Marat received money from the Palais Royal; and Sieyes to the
last regarded him as a masked agent of monarchy. Danton himself
assured the young Duc de Chartres that the Republic would not last,
and advised him to hold himself in readiness to reap, some day, what
the Jacobins were sowing.

The aim of the Jacobins was a dictatorship, which was quite a new
substitute for monarchy, and the Orleans spectre was no more than an
illusion on which the Gironde spent much of its strength. In
retaliation, they were accused of Federalism, and this also was a
false suspicion. Federal ideas, the characteristic of America, had the
sanction of the greatest names in the political literature of
France--Montesquieu and Rousseau, Necker and Mirabeau. The only
evident Federalist in the Convention is Barere. A scheme of federation
was discussed at the Jacobins on September 10, and did not come to a
vote. But the idea was never adopted by the Girondin party, or by any
one of its members, with the exception of Buzot. They favoured things
just as bad in Jacobin eyes. They inclined to decentralisation, to