n to any English or Hanoverian
soldier. (M. Hippolyte Carnot does his best to excuse this decree. His
abuse of England is merely laughable. England has managed to deal with
enemies of a very different sort from either himself or his hero. One
disgraceful blunder, however, we think it right to notice. M. Hippolyte
Carnot asserts that a motion similar to that of Barere was made in
the English Parliament by the late Lord Fitzwilliam. This assertion is
false. We defy M. Hippolyte Carnot to state the date and terms of
the motion of which he speaks. We do not accuse him of intentional
misrepresentation; but we confidently accuse him of extreme ignorance
and temerity. Our readers will be amused to learn on what authority he
has ventured to publish such a fable. He quotes, not the journals of
the Lords, not the Parliamentary Debates, but a ranting message of
the Executive Directory to the Five Hundred, a message, too, the whole
meaning of which he has utterly misunderstood.) His Carmagnole was
worthy of the proposition with which it concluded. "That one Englishman
should be spared, that for the slaves of George, for the human machines
of York, the vocabulary of our armies should contain such a word as
generosity, this is what the National Convention cannot endure. War
to the death against every English soldier. If last year, at Dunkirk,
quarter had been refused to them when they asked it on their knees,
if our troops had exterminated them all, instead of suffering them to
infest our fortresses by their presence, the English government would
not have renewed its attack on our frontiers this year. It is only the
dead man who never comes back. What is this moral pestilence which has
introduced into our armies false ideas of humanity? That the English
were to be treated with indulgence was the philanthropic notion of the
Brissotines; it was the patriotic practice of Dumourier. But humanity
consists in exterminating our enemies. No mercy to the execrable
Englishman. Such are the sentiments of the true Frenchman; for he
knows that he belongs to a nation revolutionary as nature, powerful
as freedom, ardent as the saltpetre which she has just torn from
the entrails of the earth. Soldiers of liberty, when victory places
Englishmen at your mercy, strike! None of them must return to the
servile soil of Great Britain; none must pollute the free soil of
France."

The Convention, thoroughly tamed and silenced, acquiesced in Barere's
motion