vies against the foreigner; he had gone repeatedly on
distant and harassing expeditions, as the representative of the
Convention at the camps on the frontier. In the midst of all this he
found time to press forward measures for the instruction of the young,
and for the due appointment of judges, and his head was full of ideas
for the construction of a permanent executive council. It was this which
made him eager for a cessation of the method of Terror, and it was this
which made the Committee of Public Safety his implacable enemy.

Why, then, did Robespierre, who also passed as a man of order and
humanity, not continue to support Danton after the suppression of the
Hebertists, as he had supported him before? The common and facile answer
is that he was moved by a malignant desire to put a rival out of the
way. On the whole, the evidence seems to support Napoleon's opinion that
Robespierre was incapable of voting for the death of anybody in the
world on grounds of personal enmity. And his acquiescence in the ruin of
Danton is intelligible enough on the grounds of selfish policy. The
Committee hated Danton for the good reason that he had openly attacked
them, and his cry for clemency was an inflammatory and dangerous protest
against their system. Now Robespierre, rightly or wrongly, had made up
his mind that the Committee was the instrument by which, and which only,
he could work out his own vague schemes of power and reconstruction.
And, in any case, how could he resist the Committee? The famous
insurrectionary force of Paris, which Danton had been the first to
organise against a government, had just been chilled by the fall of the
Hebertists. Least of all could this force be relied upon to rise in
defence of the very chief whose every word for many weeks past had been
a protest against the Communal leaders. In separating himself from the
Ultras, Danton had cut off the great reservoir of his peculiar strength.

It may be said that the Convention was the proper centre of resistance
to the designs of the Committee, and that if Danton and Robespierre had
united their forces in the Convention they would have defeated Billaud
and his allies. This seems to us more than doubtful. The Committee had
acquired an immense preponderance over the Convention. They had been
eminently successful in the immense tasks imposed upon them. They had
the prestige not only of being the government--so great a thing in a
country that had just emerg