the Committee of Public
Safety, while Danton had allowed himself to be dropped from membership.
Danton had just been married, and to an aristocratic wife, and the
turmoil of office had grown to be distasteful to him. On March 30, 1794,
Billaud somewhat casually remarked, "We must kill Danton;" for in truth
Danton, with conservative leanings, was becoming a grave danger to the
extreme Jacobins. Had he lived a few months longer he would have been a
Thermidorist. Billaud, therefore, only expressed the prevailing Jacobin
opinion; so the Jacobins arrested Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and his
other friends, and Danton at once anticipated what would be his doom. As
he entered his cell he said to his jailer: "I erected the Tribunal. I
ask pardon of God and men." But even yet he did not grasp the full
meaning of what he had done. At his trial he wished to introduce his
evidence fully, protesting "that he should understand the Tribunal since
he created it;" nevertheless, he did not understand the Tribunal, he
still regarded it as more or less a court. Topino-Lebrun, the artist,
did understand it. Topino sat on the jury which tried Danton, and
observed that the heart of one of his colleagues seemed failing him.
Topino took the waverer aside, and said: "This is not a _trial_, it is a
_measure_. Two men are impossible; one must perish. Will you kill
Robespierre?--No.--Then by that admission you condemn Danton." Lebrun in
these few words went to the root of the matter, and stated the identical
principle which underlies our whole doctrine of the Police Power. A
political court is not properly a court at all, but an administrative
board whose function is to work the will of the dominant faction for the
time being. Thus a political court becomes the most formidable of all
engines for the destruction of its creators the instant the social
equilibrium shifts. So Danton found, in the spring of 1794, when the
equilibrium shifted; and so Robespierre, who slew Danton, found the next
July, when the equilibrium shifted again.

Danton died on the 5th April, 1794; about three months later Jourdan won
the Fleurus campaign. Straightway Thermidor followed, and the Tribunal
worked as well for the party of Thermidor as it had for the Jacobins.
Carrier, who had wallowed in blood at Nantes, as the ideal Jacobin,
walked behind the cart which carried Robespierre to the scaffold,
shouting, "Down with the tyrant;" but that did not save him. In vain he
protes