er having complained of
this law of Prairial to Saint-Just, Saint-Just replied that if he were
to report his words, or that he was flinching, to the Committee,
Scellier would be arrested. As arrest was tantamount to sentence of
death, Scellier continued his work.

Without reasoning the subject out logically from premise to conclusion,
or being, of course, capable of doing so in the mass, Frenchmen had
collectively received the intuition that everything must be endured for
a strong government, and that whatever obstructed that government must
be eliminated. For the process of elimination they used the courts.
Under the conditions in which they were placed by the domestic enemy,
they had little alternative. If a political party opposed the
Dictatorship in the Convention, that party must be broken down; if a man
seemed likely to become a rival for the Dictatorship, that man must be
removed; all who conspired against the Republic must be destroyed as
ruthlessly at home as on the battle-field. The Republic was insolvent,
and must have money, as it must have men. If the government needed men,
it took them,--all. If it needed money, and a man were rich, it did not
hesitate to execute him and confiscate his property. There are very
famous examples of all these phenomena strewn through the history of the
Terror.

The Girondists were liberals. They always had been liberals; they had
never conspired against the Republic; but they were impracticable. The
ablest of them, Vergniaud, complained before the Tribunal, that he was
being tried for what he thought, not for what he had done. This the
government denied, but it was true. Nay, more; he was tried not for
positive but for negative opinions, and he was convicted and executed,
and his friends were convicted and executed with him, because, had they
remained in the Convention, the Dictatorship, through their opposition,
would have lost its energy. Also the form of the conviction was shocking
in the extreme. The defence of these twenty-one men was, practically,
suppressed, and the jury were directed to bring in a verdict of guilty.
Still the prosecutions of the Girondists stopped here. When they
refrained from obstruction, they were spared.

Danton and his friends may have been, and probably were, whether
intentionally or by force of circumstances, a menace to the
Dictatorship. Either Robespierre or Danton had to be eliminated. There
was not room for both. On April 1, 1793, Danton,