rive your enemies to
extremities, and you Will have them return to you from fear, or you will
subdue them by the sword. Under important circumstances, prudence is a
weakness. It is especially with respect to rebels that you should be
decisive and severe; they should be hewn down as they rise. If time be
permitted to them to have meetings and earnest partisans, then they
spread over the empire like an irresistible torrent. It is thus that
despotism acts, and it was thus that one individual kept beneath his
yoke a whole nation. If Louis XVI. had employed this great means whilst
the Revolution was but yet in its cradle, we should not now be here!
This rigour, the vice of a despot, is the virtue of a nation.
Legislators, who shrink from such extreme means, are cowards--criminals:
for when the public liberty is assailed, to pardon is to share the
crime. (Great applause.)

"Such rigour might perchance cost an effusion of blood? I know it! But
if you do not make use of it, will not more blood flow? Is not civil war
a still greater misfortune? Cut off the gangrened member to save the
whole frame.[10] Indulgence is the snare into which you are tempted. You
will find yourselves abandoned by the nation for not having dared to
sustain, nor known how to defend, it. Your enemies will hate you no
less. Your friends will lose confidence in you. The law is my God: I
have no other--the public good, that is my worship! You have already
struck the emigrants--again a decree against the refractory priests, and
you will have gained over ten millions of arms! My decree would be
comprised in two words: compel every Frenchman, priest or not, to take
the civil oath, and ordain that every man who will not sign shall be
deprived of all salary or pension. Sound policy would decree that every
one who does not sign the contract should leave the kingdom. What proofs
against the priest do we require? If there be but a complaint lodged
against the priest by the citizen with whom he lives, let him be at once
expelled! As to those against whom the penal code shall pronounce
punishment more severe than exile, there is but one sentence left:
_Death!_!"

X.

This oration, which pushed patriotism even to impiety, and made of the
public safety an implacable deity, to which even the innocent were to be
sacrificed, excited a frantic enthusiasm in the ranks of the Girondist
party, a bitter indignation amongst the moderate party. "To propose the
printing of s