ose who wished to establish a system of
tranquillity and order. The factions,' he added with fierce sarcasm,
'were to accomplish the purposes of order, morality, and submission to
the laws, from the principles of atheism, profligacy, and sedition. They
endeavoured to establish distinctions, by the belief of which they hoped
to keep the spirit of murder safely bottled up and sealed for their own
purposes, without endangering themselves by the fumes of the poison
which they prepared for their enemies.' This is a ferocious and
passionate version, but it is substantially not an unreal account of the
position.

Upon one point all parties agreed, and that was the necessity of
founding the government upon force, and force naturally meant Terror.
Their plea was that of Dido to Ilioneus and the stormbeaten sons of
Dardanus, when they complained that her people had drawn the sword upon
them, and barbarously denied the hospitality of the sandy shore:--

Res dura et regni novitas me talia cogunt Moliri.

And that pithy chapter in Machiavelli's _Prince_ which treats of cruelty
and clemency, and whether it be better to be loved or feared,
anticipates the defence of the Terrorists, in the maxim that for a new
prince it is impossible to avoid the name of cruel, because all new
states abound in many perils. The difference arose on the question when
Terror should be considered to have done as much of its work as it could
be expected to do. This difference again was connected with difference
of conception as to the type of the society which was ultimately to
emerge from the existing chaos. Billaud-Varennes, the guiding spirit of
the Committees, was without any conception of this kind. He was a man of
force pure and simple. Danton was equally untouched by dreams of social
transformation; his philosophy, so far as he had a definite philosophy,
was, in spite of one or two inconsistent utterances, materialistic: and
materialism, when it takes root in a sane, perspicacious, and indulgent
character, as in the case of Danton, and, to take a better-known
example, in the case of Jefferson, usually leads to a sound and positive
theory of politics; chimeras have no place in it, though a rational
social hope has the first place of all. Neither Danton nor Billaud
expected a millennium; their only aim was to shape France into a
coherent political personality, and the war between them turned upon the
policy of prolonging the Terror after the fronti