,
vulgar man, but of indefatigable energy and activity, who wished to do
away with all order and responsibility. He attacked the Gironde as not
sufficiently violent.

It was now war between the different sections of the revolutionists
themselves. Lafayette resolved to suppress the dangerous radicals by
force, but found it no easy thing, for the Convention was controlled by
men of violence, who filled the country with alarm, not of their
unscrupulous measures, but of the military and of foreign enemies. He
even narrowly escaped impeachment at the hands of the National
Convention.

The Convention is now overawed and controlled by the Commune and the
clubs. Lafayette flies. The mob rules Paris. The revolutionary tribunal
is decreed. Robespierre, Marat, and Danton form a triumvirate of power.
The September massacres take place. The Girondists become conservative,
and attempt to stay the progress of further excesses,--all to no
purpose, for the King himself is now impeached, and the Jacobins control
everything. The King is led to the bar of the Convention. He is
condemned by a majority only of one, and immured in the Temple. On the
20th of January, 1793, he was condemned, and the next day he mounted the
scaffold. "We have burned our ships," said Marat when the tragedy was
consummated.

With the death of the King, I bring this lecture to a close. It would
be interesting to speculate on what might have been averted, had
Mirabeau lived. But probably nothing could have saved the monarchy
except civil war, to which Louis XVI. was averse.

Nor can I dwell on the second part of the Revolution, when the
government was in the hands of those fiends and fanatics who turned
France into one vast slaughter-house of butchery and blood. I have only
to say, that the same unseen hand which humiliated the nobles,
impoverished the clergy, and destroyed the King, also visited with
retribution those monsters who had a leading hand in the work of
destruction. Marat, the infidel journalist, was stabbed by Charlotte
Corday. Danton, the minister of justice and orator of the revolutionary
clubs, was executed on the scaffold he had erected for so many innocent
men. Robespierre, the sentimental murderer and arch-conspirator, also
expiated his crimes on the scaffold; as did Saint-Just, Lebas, Couthon,
Henriot, and other legalized assassins. As the Girondists sacrificed the
royal family, so did the Jacobins sacrifice the Girondists; and the
Conventi