laboriously
struck flashes and single sounds.

Perhaps, after all, nobody else could have done better. The situation of
the Assembly, between a hostile court and a suspicious and distrustful
nation, and unable by its very nature to break the bonds, was from the
beginning desperate. In December 1791 the Legislative through its
secretary informs France of the frankness and loyalty of the king's
measures in the face of the menaces of foreign war.[30] Within eight
months, when the king's person was in captivity and his power suspended,
the same secretary has to avow that from the very beginning the king had
treated the Assembly with dissimulation, and had been in virtual league
with the national enemies. The documents issued by the Assembly after
the violent events of the Tenth of August 1792 are not edifying, and
imply in Condorcet, who composed them, a certain want of eye for
revolutionary methods. They mark the beginning of that short but most
momentous period in the history of the Revolution, when formulas, as Mr.
Carlyle says, had to be stretched out until they cracked--a process
truly called, 'especially in times of swift change, one of the
sorrowfullest tasks poor humanity has.' You might read the _Exposition
of the Motives from which the National Assembly have proclaimed the
Convention, and suspended the Executive Power of the King_,[31] without
dreaming that it is an account of a revolution which arose out of
distrust or contempt for the Assembly, which had driven the king away
from his palace and from power, and which had finally annihilated the
very chamber that was thus professing to expound its motives for doing
what the violence of Paris had really done in defiance of it. The power,
in fact, was all outside the chamber, in Danton and the Commune. Under
such circumstance it is of no interest to men to learn that 'in the
midst of these disasters the National Assembly, afflicted but calm, took
its oath to maintain equality and liberty, or to die at its post; took
the oath to save France, and looked about for means.'[32] Still more
impotent and hollow, because still more pompous, is the address of six
days later.[33] A few days after this, occurred the massacres of
prisoners in September--scenes very nearly, if not quite, as bloody and
iniquitous as those which attended the suppression of the rebellion in
Ireland six years afterwards by English troops.

When the Convention was chosen, the electors of Paris rejec