loody document, and the last signature of
the endorsement is that of him, who had resigned a post in his youth
rather than be a party to putting a man to death. As was observed at the
time, Robespierre in doing this, suppressed his pique against his
colleagues, in order to take part in a measure, that was a sort of
complement to his Law of Prairial.

From these two circumstances, then, even if there were no other, we are
justified in inferring that Robespierre was struck by no remorse at the
thought that it was his law which had unbound the hands of the horrible
genie of civil murder. His mind was wholly absorbed in the calculations
of a frigid egoism. His intelligence, as we have always to remember, was
very dim. He only aimed at one thing at once, and that was seldom
anything very great or far-reaching. He was a man of peering and
obscured vision in face of practical affairs. In passing the Law of
Prairial, his designs--and they were meritorious and creditable designs
enough in themselves--had been directed against the corrupt chiefs, such
as Tallien and Fouche, and against the fierce and coarse spirits of the
Committee of General Security, such as Vadier and Voulland. Robespierre
was above all things a precisian. He had a sentimental sympathy with the
common people in the abstract, but his spiritual pride, his pedantry,
his formalism, his personal fastidiousness, were all wounded to the very
quick by the kind of men whom the Revolution had thrown to the surface.
Gouverneur Morris, then the American minister, describes most of the
members of the two Committees as the very dregs of humanity, with whom
it is a stain to have any dealings; as degraded men only worthy of the
profoundest contempt. Danton had said: 'Robespierre is the least of a
scoundrel of any of the band.' The Committee of General Security
represented the very elements by which Robespierre was most revolted.
They offended his respectability; their evil manners seemed to tarnish
that good name which his vanity hoped to make as revered all over
Europe, as it already was among his partisans in France. It was
indispensable therefore to cut them off from the revolutionary
government, just as Hebert and as Danton had been cut off. His
colleagues of Public Safety refused to lend themselves to this.
Henceforth, with characteristically narrow tenacity, he looked round for
new combinations, but, so far as I can see, with no broader design than
to enable him to puni