t of the entire public is to
be vindicated. The public enemy has only to be identified. The State
despatches him to save itself. Therefore the Committee was empowered
to send whom it chose before the tribunal, and if the jury was
satisfied, no time was to be lost with witnesses, written depositions,
or arguments. Nobody whom Robespierre selected for execution would be
allowed to delay judgment by defence; and that there might be no
exception or immunity from arbitrary arrest and immediate sentence,
all previous decrees in matter of procedure were revoked. That article
contained the whole point, for it deprived the Convention of
jurisdiction for the protection of its own members. Robespierre had
only to send a deputy's name to the public accuser, and he would be in
his grave next day. The point had been so well concealed that nobody
perceived it. Afterwards, the deputies, warned by the great jurist
Merlin, saw what they had done, and on June 11, they stipulated that
no member should be arrested without leave of the Convention. Couthon
and Robespierre were not present. On the 12th, by threatening that the
Committees would resign, they caused the decree of the previous day to
be rescinded, but they assured the Assembly that it was superfluous,
and their design had been misunderstood. They maintained their text,
and gained their object; but the success was on the other side. The
scheme had been exposed, and the Convention had resisted, for the
first time. The opposing deputies had received warning, and showed
that they understood. From that moment they were on the watch, and
their enemy shrank from employing against them a clause the validity
of which he had denied. He gave them time to combine. Over the rest of
the nation he exerted his new power without control. The victims
increased rapidly in number. Down to the middle of June, in fourteen
months, the executions had been about 1200. In seven weeks, after the
law of Prairial, they were 1376; that is, an average of 32 in a week
rose to an average of 196. But the guillotine was removed to a distant
part of the city, where a deep trench was dug to carry away such
quantities of blood.

During this time the Tribunal was not acting against men actually in
public life, and we are not compelled to study its judgments, as if
they were making history. Whilst inoffensive people were suffering
obscurely, the enemies of the tyrant were plotting to save themselves
from the dreadful f