eviously looked upon the Revolution
with favor. Those who had any opulence to forfeit, or any position in
society to maintain, were ready to welcome as deliverers the allied
army of invasion. It was then, to meet this emergency, that that
terrible Revolutionary Tribunal was organized, which raised the ax of
the guillotine as the one all-potent instrument of government, and
which shed such oceans of innocent blood. "Two hundred and sixty
thousand heads," said Marat, "must fall before France will be safe
from internal foes." Danton, Marat, and Robespierre were now in the
ascendency, riding with resistless power upon the billows of mob
violence. Whenever they wished to carry any measure, they sent forth
their agents to the dens and lurking-places of degradation and crime,
and surrounded and filled the hall of the Assembly with blood-thirsty
assassins. "Those who call themselves _respectable_," said Marat,
"wish to give laws to those whom they call the _rabble_. We will teach
them that the time is come in which the _rabble_ is to reign."

This Revolutionary Tribunal, consisting of five judges, a jury, and a
public accuser, all appointed by the Convention, was proposed and
decreed on the same evening. It possessed unlimited powers to
confiscate property and take life. The Girondists dared not vote
against this tribunal. The public voice would pronounce them the worst
of traitors. France was now a charnel-house. Blood flowed in streams
which were never dry. Innocence had no protection. Virtue was
suspicion, suspicion a crime, the guillotine the penalty, and the
confiscated estate the bribe to accusation. Thus there was erected, in
the name of liberty and popular rights, over the ruins of the French
monarchy, a system of despotism the most atrocious and merciless under
which humanity has ever groaned.

Again and again had the Jacobins called the mob into the Assembly, and
compelled the members to vote with the poniards of assassins at their
breasts. Madame Roland now despaired of liberty. Calumny, instead of
gratitude, was unsparingly heaped upon herself and her husband. This
requital, so unexpected, was more dreadful to her than the scaffold.
All the promised fruits of the Revolution had disappeared, and
desolation and crime alone were realized. The Girondists still met in
Madame Roland's library to deliberate concerning measures for averting
the impending ruin. All was unavailing.

The most distressing embarrassments now