nvenience. For surely, if you
give no quarter, the plain issue is that you will get none; and so the
business become as broad as it was long.--Our 'recruitment of Three
Hundred Thousand men,' which was the decreed force for this year, is
like to have work enough laid to its hand.

So many enemies come wending on; penetrating through throats of
Mountains, steering over the salt sea; towards all points of our
territory; rattling chains at us. Nay worst of all: there is an enemy
within our own territory itself. In the early days of March, the Nantes
Postbags do not arrive; there arrive only instead of them Conjecture,
Apprehension, bodeful wind of Rumour. The bodefullest proves true! Those
fanatic Peoples of La Vendee will no longer keep under: their fire of
insurrection, heretofore dissipated with difficulty, blazes out anew,
after the King's Death, as a wide conflagration; not riot, but civil
war. Your Cathelineaus, your Stofflets, Charettes, are other men than
was thought: behold how their Peasants, in mere russet and hodden,
with their rude arms, rude array, with their fanatic Gaelic frenzy and
wild-yelling battle-cry of God and the King, dash at us like a dark
whirlwind; and blow the best-disciplined Nationals we can get into panic
and sauve-qui-peut! Field after field is theirs; one sees not where it
will end. Commandant Santerre may be sent thither; but with non-effect;
he might as well have returned and brewed beer.

It has become peremptorily necessary that a National Convention cease
arguing, and begin acting. Yield one party of you to the other, and do
it swiftly. No theoretic outlook is here, but the close certainty of
ruin; the very day that is passing over must be provided for.

It was Friday the eighth of March when this Job's-post from Dumouriez,
thickly preceded and escorted by so many other Job's-posts, reached the
National Convention. Blank enough are most faces. Little will it avail
whether our Septemberers be punished or go unpunished; if Pitt and
Cobourg are coming in, with one punishment for us all; nothing now
between Paris itself and the Tyrants but a doubtful Dumouriez, and hosts
in loose-flowing loud retreat!--Danton the Titan rises in this hour, as
always in the hour of need. Great is his voice, reverberating from the
domes:--Citizen-Representatives, shall we not, in such crisis of Fate,
lay aside discords? Reputation: O what is the reputation of this man or
of that? Que mon nom soit fletri, q