members were to be found among the party
of the Montagnards. During the hottest time of the Revolution, the
three men most distinguished as Montagnards and Jacobins were Marat,
Danton, and Robespierre. Mirabeau, the orator of the Revolution, had
already disappeared, being so fortunate as to die naturally, before
the practice of mutual guillotining was established. After him,
Vergniaud, the leader of the Girondists, was perhaps the most
effective speaker; and till his fall, he possessed a commanding
influence in the Convention. Danton was likewise a speaker of vast
power, and from his towering figure, he seemed like a giant among
pigmies. Marat might be termed the representative of the kennel. He
was a low demagogue, flaunting in rags, dirty, and venomous: he was
always calling out for more blood, as if the grand desideratum was the
annihilation of mankind. Among the extreme men, Robespierre, by his
eloquence, his artifice, and his bold counsels, contrived to maintain
his position. This was no easy matter, for it was necessary to remain
firm and unfaltering in every emergency. He, like the others at the
helm of affairs, was constantly impelled forward by the clubs, but
more so by the incessant clamours of the mob. At the Hotel de Ville
sat the Commune, a crew of blood-thirsty villains, headed by Hebert;
and this miscreant, with his armed sections, accompanied by paid
female furies, beset the Convention, and carried measures of severity
by sheer intimidation. Let it further be remembered that, in 1793,
France was kept in apprehension of invasion by the Allies under the
Duke of Brunswick, and the army of emigrant noblesse under the command
of Conde. The hovering of these forces on the frontiers, and their
occasional successes, produced a constant alarm of counter-revolution,
which was believed to be instigated by secret intriguers in the very
heart of the Convention. It was alleged by Robespierre in his greatest
orations, that the safety of the Republic depended on keeping up a
wholesome state of terror; and that all who, in the slightest degree,
leaned towards clemency, sanctioned the work of intriguers, and ought,
accordingly, to be proscribed. By such harangues--in the main,
miserable sophistry--he acquired prodigious popularity, and was in
fact irresistible.

Thus was legalised the Reign of Terror, which, founded in false
reasoning and insane fears, we must, nevertheless, look back upon as a
thing, at least to a cert