f the foreign enemy. The fate of the
Revolution lay in the issue of a struggle between Paris, with less than
a score of departments on her side, and all the rest of France and the
whole European coalition marshalled against her. And even this was not
the worst. In Paris itself a very considerable proportion of its
half-million of inhabitants were disaffected to the revolutionary cause.
Reactionary historians dwell on the fact that such risings as that of
the Tenth of August were devised by no more than half of the sections
into which Paris was divided. It was common, they say, for half a dozen
individuals to take upon themselves to represent the fourteen or fifteen
hundred other members of a section. But what better proof can we have
that if France was to be delivered from restored feudalism and foreign
spoliation, the momentous task must be performed by those who had sense
to discern the awful peril, and energy to encounter it?

The Girondins had made their incapacity plain. The execution of the King
had filled them with alarm, and with hatred against the ruder and more
robust party who had forced that startling act of vengeance upon them.
Puny social disgusts prevented them from co-operating with Danton or
with Robespierre. Prussia and Austria were not more redoubtable or more
hateful to them than was Paris, and they wasted, in futile
recriminations about the September massacres or the alleged peculations
of municipal officers, the time and the energy that should have been
devoted without let or interruption to the settlement of the
administration and the repulse of the foe. It is impossible to think of
such fine characters as Vergniaud or Madame Roland without admiration,
or of their untimely fate without pity. But the deliverance of a people
beset by strong and implacable enemies could not wait on mere good
manners and fastidious sentiments, when these comely things were in
company with the most stupendous want of foresight ever shown by a
political party. How can we measure the folly of men who so missed the
conditions of the problem as to cry out in the Convention itself, almost
within earshot of the Jacobin Club, that if any insult were offered to
the national representation, the departments would rise, 'Paris would be
annihilated; and men would come to search on the banks of the Seine
whether such a city had ever existed!' It was to no purpose that Danton
urgently rebuked the senseless animosity with which the Ri