g roused the people to
panic, and frenzied resolutions of resistance and retribution.
Thousands, whose only crime was a suspected want of sympathy, were
crowded into the prisons of Paris. Hoary age, the bounding boy, the
tender virgin, the loving wife, the holy priest, the sainted nun, the
titled lady, filed along with the depraved of both sexes in endless
procession through those massive gates, never more to see the sky and
the green earth again. For the mob had resolved to extirpate its enemies
in the city before marching against foreign invaders. It went from
prison to prison, bursting in the doors, and slaughtering without
distinction of age, sex, or condition. Madame Roland was nearly frantic
over these scenes. Her divinity had turned to Moloch in her very
presence. Her husband called for troops to stop the horrible massacre,
but none were furnished, and it went on until men were too tired to
slay. These acts were doubtless incited by the Jacobin leaders, though
they cloaked with secrecy their complicity in these great crimes. The
Jacobins became all-powerful. The Girondists became the party of the
past, and from this time their history is a record of a party in name,
but in such act of dissolution as to make its efforts spasmodic,
clique-like, and personal; sometimes grand, sometimes cruel, and often
cowardly. They were under the coercion of public opinion, but were
dragged instead of driven by it. They frequently held back, but this was
merely a halt, which accelerated the rapidity of the march which left
them at the scaffold, where they regained their heroism in the presence
of death, while the bloody mob went on to a similar ending a little
distance beyond.

When the lull came, after the massacre, the two parties stood looking at
each other across the river of blood. The Jacobins accused the
Girondists of being enemies of the country. It is characteristic of
revolutionary times to accuse vaguely and to punish severely. Socrates
died as an alleged corrupter of youth. Pilate, after acquitting Jesus of
the crime of high treason, suffered him to be executed for "teaching
throughout all Jewry." "Roundhead" and "Cavalier" were once expressive
terms of condemnation. In our own times the words "slave-holder,"
"abolitionist," "loyal," "disloyal," and "rebel" have formed the
compendious summing up of years of history. An indictment is compressed
into an epithet in such times. In the time of Madame Roland, to be "a
suspe