tinacy will give to the king's heart; they would be the
most painful he could experience."

The Assembly was not blinded by these manifestations; it saw beneath a
secret design of escaping from the severest measures; it was desirous of
compelling the king to carry them out, and, let us add, the nation and
the public safety also required it.

XII.

Mirabeau had treated the question of the emigration of the Constituent
Assembly rather as a philosopher than a statesman. He had disputed with
the legislator the right of making laws against emigration: he was
mistaken. Whenever a theory is in contradiction to the welfare of
society it is because that theory is false, for society is the supreme
truth.

Unquestionably in ordinary times, man is not imprisoned by nature, and
ought not to be by the law, within the frontiers of his native land;
and, with this view, the laws against emigration should only be
exceptional laws. But, because exceptional, are these laws therefore
unjust? Evidently not. The public danger has its peculiar laws, as
necessary and as just as laws made in a time of security. A state of war
is not a state of peace. You shut your frontiers to strangers in war
time; you may close them to your citizens. A city is legally put in a
state of siege during a sedition. We can put the nation in a state of
siege in case of external danger co-existent with internal conspiracy.
By what absurd abuse of liberty can a state be constrained to tolerate
on a foreign soil gatherings of citizens armed against itself, which it
would not tolerate in its own land? And if these gatherings should be
culpable without, why should the state be interdicted from shutting up
those roads which lead emigrants to these gatherings? A nation defends
itself from its foreign enemies by arms, from its internal foes by its
laws. To act otherwise would be to consecrate without the country the
inviolability of conspiracies which were punished within: it would be to
proclaim the legality of civil war, provided it was mixed up with
foreign war, and that sedition was covered by treason. Such maxims ruin
a whole people's nationality, in order to protect abuse of liberty by
certain citizens. The Constituent Assembly was so wrong as to sanction
such. Had it proclaimed from the beginning the laws repressive of
emigration in troubled times, during revolutions, or on the eve of war,
it would have proclaimed a national truth, and prevented one of the
grea