the part of any other class of citizens would have
been instantly punished by wholesale massacre; but the Committee of
Public Safety was aware that the discipline which had tamed the
unwarlike population of the fields and cities might not answer in camps.
To fling people by scores out of a boat, and, when they catch hold of
it, to chop off their fingers with a hatchet, is undoubtedly a very
agreeable pastime for a thoroughbred Jacobin, when the sufferers are, as
at Nantes, old confessors, young girls, or women with child. But such
sport might prove a little dangerous if tried upon grim ranks of
grenadiers, marked with the scars of Hondschoote, and singed by the
smoke of Fleurus.

Barere, however, found some consolation. If he could not succeed in
murdering the English and the Hanoverians, he was amply indemnified by a
new and vast slaughter of his own countrymen and countrywomen. If the
defence which has been set up for the members of the Committee of Public
Safety had been well founded, if it had been true that they governed
with extreme severity only because the Republic was in extreme peril, it
is clear that the severity would have diminished as the peril
diminished. But the fact is, that those cruelties for which the public
danger is made a plea became more and more enormous as the danger became
less and less, and reached the full height when there was no longer any
danger at all. In the autumn of 1793 there was undoubtedly reason to
apprehend that France might be unable to maintain the struggle against
the European Coalition. The enemy was triumphant on the frontiers. More
than half the departments disowned the authority of the Convention. But
at that time eight or ten necks a day were thought an ample allowance
for the guillotine of the capital. In the summer of 1794, Bordeaux,
Toulon, Caen, Lyons, Marseilles, had submitted to the ascendency of
Paris. The French arms were victorious under the Pyrenees and on the
Sambre. Brussels had fallen. Prussia had announced her intention of
withdrawing from the contest. The Republic, no longer content with
defending her own independence, was beginning to meditate conquest
beyond the Alps and the Rhine. She was now more formidable to her
neighbors than ever Louis the Fourteenth had been. And now the
Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris was not content with forty, fifty, sixty
heads in a morning. It was just after a series of victories, which
destroyed the whole force of the single