volutionary justice, have fallen by their own hands.

These ministers were regarded by the king as in a conspiracy to dethrone
him. Nobody who considers the circumstances which preceded the
deposition of Louis the Sixteenth, nobody who attends to the subsequent
conduct of those ministers, can hesitate about the reality of such a
conspiracy. The king certainly had no doubt of it; he found himself
obliged to remove them; and the necessity, which first obliged him to
choose such regicide ministers constrained him to replace them by
Dumouriez the Jacobin, and some others of little efficiency, though of a
better description.

A little before this removal, and evidently as a part of the conspiracy,
Roland put into the king's hands, as a memorial, the most insolent,
seditious, and atrocious libel that has probably ever been penned. This
paper Roland a few days after delivered to the National Assembly,[2] who
instantly published and dispersed it over all France; and in order to
give it the stronger operation, they declared that he and his brother
ministers had carried with them the regret of the nation. None of the
writings which have inflamed the Jacobin spirit to a savage fury ever
worked up a fiercer ferment through the whole mass of the republicans
in every part of France.

Under the thin veil of _prediction_, he strongly _recommends_ all the
abominable practices which afterwards followed. In particular, he
inflamed the minds of the populace against the respectable and
conscientious clergy, who became the chief objects of the massacre, and
who were to him the chief objects of a malignity and rancor that one
could hardly think to exist in an human heart.

We have the relics of his fanatical persecution here. We are in a
condition to judge of the merits of the persecutors and of the
persecuted: I do not say the accusers and accused; because, in all the
furious declamations of the atheistic faction against these men, not one
specific charge has been made upon any one person of those who suffered
in their massacre or by their decree of exile.

The king had declared that he would sooner perish under their axe (he
too well saw what was preparing for him) than give his sanction to the
iniquitous act of proscription under which those innocent people were to
be transported.

On this proscription of the clergy a principal part of the ostensible
quarrel between the king and those ministers had turned. From the time
of the autho