rms
on your frontier may find you famished and disarmed. The
emigrants--d'Artois and Conde--there receive instructions of the coming
vengeance of despotism. A guard of Swiss stipendiaries is not enough for
the liberticide schemes of the Capets. Every night the good citizens who
watch around this den see the ancient nobility entering stealthily and
concealing arms beneath their clothes. Can knights of the poignard be
any thing but the enrolled assassins of the people? What is La Fayette
doing,--is he a dupe or an accomplice? Why does he leave free the
avenues of the palace, which is only opened for vengeance or flight? Why
do we leave the Revolution incomplete, and also leave in the hands of
our crowned enemy, still in the midst of us, the time to overcome and
destroy it? Do you not see that specie is disappearing and assignats are
discredited? What means the assemblings on your frontier of emigrants
and armed bodies, who are advancing to enclose you in a circle of iron?
What are your ministers doing? Why is not the property of emigrants
confiscated, their houses burnt, their heads set at a price? In whose
hands are arms? In the hands of traitors. Who command your troops?
traitors! Who hold the keys of your strong places? traitors, traitors,
traitors, everywhere traitors; and in this palace of treason, the king
of traitors! the inviolable traitor, the king! They tell you that he
loves the constitution,--humbug! he comes to the Assembly,--humbug; the
better he conceals his flight. Watch! watch! a great blow is preparing,
is ready to burst; if you do not prevent it by a counter-blow more
sudden, more terrible, the people and liberty are annihilated."

These declarations were not wholly void of foundation. The king, honest
and good, did not conspire against his people, the queen did not think
of selling to the House of Austria the crown of her husband and her son.
If the constitution now completed had been able to restore order to the
country and security to the throne, no sacrifice of power would have
been felt by Louis XVI.: never did prince find more innate in his
character the conditions of his moderation: that passive resignation,
which is the character of constitutional sovereigns, was his virtue. He
neither desired to reconquer nor to avenge himself. All he desired was,
that his sincerity should be appreciated by the people, order
re-established within and power without; that the Assembly, receding
from the encroachm