Assembly, he had been in communication
with the Court respecting his Reports on the Woods and Forests. He
was acquitted of all criminality by the Convention; but the fiercer
Republicans considered him as a tool of the fallen monarch; and this
reproach was long repeated in the journal of Marat, and in the speeches
at the Jacobin club. It was natural that a man like Barere should,
under such circumstances, try to distinguish himself among the crowd of
regicides by peculiar ferocity. It was because he had been a royalist
that he was one of the foremost in shedding blood.

The King was no more. The leading Girondists had, by their conduct
towards him, lowered their character in the eyes both of friends and
foes. They still, however, maintained the contest against the Mountain,
called for vengeance on the assassins of September, and protested
against the anarchical and sanguinary doctrines of Marat. For a time
they seemed likely to prevail. As publicists and orators, they had no
rivals in the Convention. They had with them, beyond all doubt, the
great majority both of the deputies and of the French nation. These
advantages, it should seem, ought to have decided the event of the
struggle. But the opposite party had compensating advantages of a
different kind. The chiefs of the Mountain, though not eminently
distinguished by eloquence or knowledge, had great audacity, activity,
and determination. The Convention and France were against them; but the
mob of Paris, the clubs of Paris, and the municipal government of Paris,
were on their side.

The policy of the Jacobins, in this situation, was to subject France
to an aristocracy infinitely worse than that aristocracy which had
emigrated with the count of Artois--to an aristocracy not of birth, not
of wealth, not of education, but of mere locality. They would not hear
of privileged orders; but they wished to have a privileged city. That
twenty-five millions of Frenchmen should be ruled by a hundred thousand
gentlemen and clergymen was insufferable; but that twenty-five millions
of Frenchmen should be ruled by a hundred thousand Parisians was as it
should be. The qualification of a member of the new oligarchy was simply
that he should live near the hall where the Convention met, and should
be able to squeeze himself daily into the gallery during a debate, and
now and then to attend with a pike for the purpose of blockading the
doors. It was quite agreeable to the maxims of the Mou