ors belonged to the party, among whom
Carnot is only the most celebrated. Napoleon, who understood talent
and said that no men were so vigorous and efficient as those who had
gone through the Revolution, gave office to 127 regicides, most of
whom were Montagnards.

The Girondins, vacillating and divided, would never have made the
Republic triumph over the _whole_ of Europe and the half of France.
They were immediately confronted by a general war and a formidable
insurrection. They were not afraid of war. The great military powers
were Austria and Prussia, and they had been driven to the Rhine by
armies of thirty or forty thousand men. After that, the armies of
Spain and England did not seem formidable. This calculation proved to
be correct. The audacity of the French appeared in their declaration
of war against the three chief maritime powers at once--England,
Spain, and Holland. It was not until 1797, not for four years, that
the superiority of the British fleet was established. They had long
hoped that war with England could be avoided, and carried on
negotiations through a succession of secret agents. There was a notion
that the English government was revolutionary in character as it was
in origin, that the execution of the king was done in pursuance of
English examples, that a Protestant country must admire men who
followed new ideas. Brissot, like Napoleon in 1815, built his hopes on
the opposition. Mr. Fox could not condemn the institution of a
Republic; and a party that had applauded American victories over their
own countrymen might be expected to feel some sympathy with a country
which was partly imitating England and partly America.

War with continental absolutism was the proper price of revolution;
but the changes since 1789 were changes in the direction of a Whig
alliance. When the Convention were informed that George III. would not
have a regicide minister in the country, they did not debate the
matter, but passed it over to a committee. They acted not only from a
sense of national dignity, but in the belief that the event was not
very terrible. The Girondins thought that the war would not be popular
in England, that the Whigs, the revolutionary societies, and the
Irish, would bring it to an early termination. Marat, who knew this
country, affirmed that it was an illusion. But there was no opposition
to the successive declarations of war with England, Holland, and the
Spanish and Neapolitan Bourbons, whi