in the ashes of their homes on the rack and the wheel.

Though Danton had many and obvious weaknesses he was a good lawyer, and
Danton perceived that though he might not have been able to prevent the
September massacres, and although they might have been and probably were
inevitable under the tension which prevailed, yet that any court, even a
political court, would be better than Marat's mob. Some months later he
explained his position to the Convention when it was considering the
erection of the tribunal which finally sent Danton himself to the
scaffold. "Nothing is more difficult than to define a political crime.
But, if a simple citizen, for any ordinary crime, receives immediate
punishment, if it is so difficult to reach a political crime, is it not
necessary that extraordinary laws ... intimidate the rebels and reach
the culpable? Here public safety requires strong remedies and terrible
measures. I see no compromise between ordinary forms and a revolutionary
tribunal. History attests this truth; and since members have dared in
this assembly to refer to those bloody days which every good citizen has
lamented, I say that, if such a tribunal had then existed, the people
who have been so often and so cruelly reproached for them, would never
have stained them with blood; I say, and I shall have the assent of all
who have watched these movements, that no human power could have checked
the outburst of the national vengeance."

In this perversion of the courts lay, as I understand it, the foulest
horror of the French Revolution. It was the effect of the rigidity of
privilege, a rigidity which found its incarnation in the judiciary. The
constitutional decisions of the parliaments under the old regime would
alone have made their continuance impossible, but the worst evil was
that, after the shell crumbled, the mind within the shell survived, and
discredited the whole regular administration of justice. When the
National Assembly came to examine grievances it found protests against
the judicial system from every corner of France, and it referred these
petitions to a committee which reported in August, 1789. Setting aside
the centralization and consolidation of the system as being, for us,
immaterial, the committee laid down four leading principles of reform.
First, purchase of place should be abolished, and judicial office should
be recognized as a public trust. Second, judges should be confined to
applying, and restrained f