and habits. These communities he proposed to unite by a tie
similar to that which binds together the grave Puritans of Connecticut
and the dissolute slave-drivers of New Orleans. To Paris he was
unwilling to grant even the rank which Washington holds in the United
States. He thought it desirable that the congress of the French
federation should have no fixed place of meeting, but should sit
sometimes at Rouen, sometimes at Bordeaux, sometimes at his own
Toulouse.

Animated by such feelings, he was, till the close of May, 1793, a
Girondist, if not an ultra-Girondist. He exclaimed against those impure
and bloodthirsty men who wished to make the public danger a pretext for
cruelty and rapine. "Peril," he said, "could be no excuse for crime. It
is when the wind blows hard, and the waves run high, that the anchor is
most needed; it is when a revolution is raging that the great laws of
morality are most necessary to the safety of a state." Of Marat he spoke
with abhorrence and contempt; of the municipal authorities of Paris with
just severity. He loudly complained that there were Frenchmen who paid
to the Mountain that homage which was due to the Convention alone. When
the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal was first proposed, he
joined himself to Vergniaud and Buzot, who strongly objected to that
odious measure. "It cannot be," exclaimed Barere, "that men really
attached to liberty will imitate the most frightful excesses of
despotism!" He proved to the Convention, after his fashion, out of
Sallust, that such arbitrary courts may indeed, for a time, be severe
only on real criminals, but must inevitably degenerate into instruments
of private cupidity and revenge. When, on the tenth of March, the worst
part of the population of Paris made the first unsuccessful attempt to
destroy the Girondists, Barere eagerly called for vigorous measures of
repression and punishment. On the second of April, another attempt of
the Jacobins of Paris to usurp supreme dominion over the republic was
brought to the knowledge of the Convention; and again Barere spoke with
warmth against the new tyranny which afflicted France, and declared
that the people of the departments would never crouch beneath the
tyranny of one ambitious city. He even proposed a resolution to the
effect that the Convention would exert against the demagogues of the
capital the same energy which had been exerted against the tyrant Louis.
We are assured that, in private