in proscription and death.

It will be asked, how the Minister of the Home Department was employed
at this crisis. The day after the massacre had commenced, Roland
appeared; but not with the powerful apparatus of a protecting
magistrate, to rescue those who had survived the slaughter of the first
day: nothing of this. On the 3rd of September, (that is, the day after
the commencement of the massacre,[3]) he writes a long, elaborate,
verbose epistle to the Assembly, in which, after magnifying, according
to the _bon-ton_ of the Revolution, his own integrity, humanity,
courage, and patriotism, he first directly justifies all the bloody
proceedings of the 10th of August. He considers the slaughter of that
day as a necessary measure for defeating a conspiracy which (with a full
knowledge of the falsehood of his assertion) he asserts to have been
formed for a massacre of the people of Paris, and which he more than
insinuates was the work of his late unhappy master,--who was universally
known to carry his dread of shedding the blood of his most guilty
subjects to an excess.

"Without the day of the 10th," says he, "it is evident that we should
have been lost. The court, prepared for a long time, waited for the
hour which was to accumulate all treasons, to display over Paris the
standard of death, and to reign there by terror. The sense of the
people, (_le sentiment_,) always just and ready when their opinion is
not corrupted, foresaw the epoch marked for their destruction, and
rendered it fatal to the conspirators." He then proceeds, in the cant
which has been applied to palliate all their atrocities from the 14th of
July, 1789, to the present time:--"It is in the nature of things,"
continues he, "and in that of the human heart, that victory should bring
with it _some_ excess. The sea, agitated by a violent storm, roars
_long_ after the tempest; but _everything has bounds_, which ought _at
length_ to be observed."

In this memorable epistle, he considers such _excesses_ as fatalities
arising from the very nature of things, and consequently not to be
punished. He allows a space of time for the duration of these
agitations; and lest he should be thought rigid and too scanty in his
measure, he thinks it may be _long_. But he would have things to cease
_at length_. But when? and where?--When they may approach his own
person.

"_Yesterday_," says he, "the ministers _were denounced: vaguely_,
indeed, as to the _matter_, because