s deserts, as
the model of republican virtue. We are far from regarding even the best
of the Girondists with unmixed admiration; but history owes to them this
honorable testimony, that, being free to choose whether they would be
oppressors or victims, they deliberately and firmly resolved rather to
suffer injustice than to inflict it.

And now began that strange period known by the name of the Reign of
Terror. The Jacobins had prevailed. This was their hour, and the power
of darkness. The Convention was subjugated and reduced to profound
silence on the highest questions of state. The sovereignty passed to the
Committee of Public Safety. To the edicts framed by that Committee the
representative assembly did not venture to offer even the species of
opposition which the ancient Parliament had frequently offered to the
mandates of the ancient kings. Six persons held the chief power in the
small cabinet which now domineered over France,--Robespierre, St. Just,
Couthon, Collot, Billaud, and Barere.

To some of these men, and of those who adhered to them, it is due to say
that the fanaticism which had emancipated them from the restraints of
justice and compassion had emancipated them also from the dominion of
vulgar cupidity and of vulgar fear; that, while hardly knowing where to
find an assignat of a few francs to pay for a dinner, they expended with
strict integrity the immense revenue which they collected by every art
of rapine; and that they were ready, in support of their cause, to mount
the scaffold with as much indifference as they showed when they signed
the death-warrants of aristocrats and priests. But no great party can be
composed of such materials as these. It is the inevitable law that such
zealots as we have described shall collect around them a multitude of
slaves, of cowards, and of libertines, whose savage tempers and
licentious appetites, withheld only by the dread of law and magistracy
from the worst excesses, are called into full activity by the hope of
impunity. A faction which, from whatever motive, relaxes the great laws
of morality is certain to be joined by the most immoral part of the
community. This has been repeatedly proved in religious wars. The war of
the Holy Sepulchre, the Albigensian war, the Huguenot war, the Thirty
Years' war, all originated in pious zeal. That zeal inflamed the
champions of the church to such a point that they regarded all
generosity to the vanquished as a sinful weakness