in throwing
aside principles in order to take up arms.

The Girondists, who did not wish that Isnard should have gone so far,
felt that it was necessary to follow him whithersoever popularity should
lead him. In vain did Condorcet defend his proposition for a delay of
the decree. The Assembly, in a report brought up by Ducastel, adopted
the decree of its legislative committee. The principal clauses were,
that the French, assembled on the other side of the frontiers, should
be, from that moment, declared actuated by conspiracy towards France;
that they should be declared actual conspirators, if they did not return
before the 1st of January, 1792, and as such punished with death; that
the French princes, brothers of the king, should be punishable with
death, like other emigrants, if they did not obey the summons thus sent
to them; that, for the present, their revenues should be sequestrated;
and, finally, that those military and naval officers who abandoned their
posts without leave, or their resignation being accepted, should be
considered as deserters, and punished with death.

XVIII.

These two decrees struck terror to the heart of the king, and
consternation to his council. The constitution gave him the right of
suspending them by the royal _veto_; but to suspend the effects of the
national indignation against the armed enemies of the Revolution, was to
invoke it on his own head. The Girondists artfully fomented these
elements of discord between the Assembly and the king. They impatiently
awaited until the refusal to sanction the decrees should urge irritation
to its height, and force the king to fly or place himself in their
hands.

The most monarchical spirit of the Constituent Assembly still reigned in
the Directory of the department of Paris. Desmeuniers, Baumetz,
Talleyrand-Perigord, Larochefoucauld, were the principal members. They
drew up an address to the king, entreating him to refuse his sanction to
the decree against the nonjuring priests. This address, in which the
Legislative Assembly was treated with much disdain, breathes the true
spirit of government as regards religious matters. It is comprised in
the axiom which is or ought to be the code of all consciences, "Since no
religion is a law, let no religion be a crime!"

A young writer whose name, already celebrated, was to be hereafter
consecrated by martyrdom, Andre Chenier, considering the question in the
highest strain of philosophy, published