olunteers, and these volunteers had to be armed and
disciplined and fed and led against the greatest and strongest coalition
which the modern world had ever seen. France, under Camot, became a vast
workshop. Its most eminent scientific men taught the people how to
gather saltpetre and the government how to manufacture powder and
artillery. Horses had to be obtained. Carnot was as reckless of himself
as of others. He knew no rest. There was that to be done which had to be
done quickly and at any cost; there was that or annihilation.

On October 21, 1794, when the people had gathered in the Champ de Mars
to celebrate the Festival of Victories, after the President of the
Convention had proclaimed that the Republic had been delivered, Carnot
announced what had been accomplished.

France had won twenty-seven victories, of which eight had been pitched
battles.

One hundred and twenty lesser combats. France had killed eighty
thousand enemies.

Had taken ninety-one thousand prisoners.

Also one hundred and sixteen places or towns, six after siege.

Two hundred and thirty forts or redoubts.

Three thousand eight hundred cannon.

Seventy thousand muskets.

Ninety flags.

As Benjamin Constant has observed, nothing can change the stupendous
fact "that the Convention found the enemy at thirty leagues from Paris,
... and made peace at thirty leagues from Vienna."

Under the stimulus of a change in environment of mind is apt to expand
with something of this resistless energy. It did so in the Reformation.
It may be said almost invariably to do so, when decay does not
supervene, and it now concerns us to consider, in some rough way, what
the cost to the sinking class of attempting repression may be, when it
miscalculates its power in such an emergency.

I take it to be tolerably clear that, if the French privileged classes
had accepted the reforms of Turgot in good faith, and thus had spread
the movement of the revolution over a generation, there would have been
no civil war and no confiscations, save confiscations of ecclesiastical
property. I take it also that there would have been no massacres and no
revolutionary tribunals, if France in 1793 had fought foreign enemies
alone, as England did in 1688. Even as it was the courts did not grow
thoroughly political until the preservation of the new type of mind came
to hinge largely on the extermination of the old. Danton's first and
relatively benign revolutionary tribunal,