e spirit now entering the Revolution, the fury of destruction,
the dementia of suspicion, the reign of terror.

The terrorists were of two sorts, the men of faction like Hebert;
together with those who accepted terrorism reluctantly but daringly like
Danton; with them terror was a political weapon. With Robespierre,
however, and his Jacobin stalwarts, it was something more, a strangely
compounded thing, a political weapon in a sense, but a weapon behind
which stood a bigot, a fanatic, a temperament governed by jealous fears
and by the morbid revengefulness of the man of feeble physique. It was
Robespierre who always stood for the worst side of terrorism, for all
that was most insidious and deep seated in it; and after its failure and
the reaction in the summer of 1794, it was his name that was deservedly
associated with the reign of terror.

Robespierre in the summer of 1793 was still logically maintaining his
attitude; while Danton fought the enemies of the Republic, he fought
Danton's measures. He told the Jacobin Club that it was always the same
{192} proposal they had to face, new levies, new battalions, to feed the
great butchery. The plan of the enemies of the people,--he did not yet
dare declare that Danton was one of them,--was to destroy the republic by
civil and foreign war. In a manuscript note found after his death, he
says "The interior danger comes from the bourgeois; to conquer them one
must rally the people. The Convention must use the people and must
spread insurrection. . . ." In August, carrying his thought a step
further, he appeals to the Jacobin Club against the traitors whom he sees
in everyone whose opinion diverges a hair's breadth from his own. There
are traitors, he declares, even on the Committee of Public Safety, and
all traitors must go to the guillotine.

At the moment this speech was delivered Admiral Lord Hood had just
captured Toulon, while Marseilles was being attacked by Carteaux at the
head of an army acting for the Convention. Coburg, commanding the
Austrian forces in the Netherlands, was gaining a series of minor
successes, and his cavalry was not much more than four days' march from
Paris. Provisions were being gathered into the city by requisition, that
is, by armed columns operating in the neighbouring departments. {193}
Confiscatory measures passed the Convention for raising a forced loan of
1,000,000,000 francs, for converting "superfluous" income to the use of
th