er constructing it, did he not serve as its engineer?

Because, if competent to construct it, he was not qualified to manage
it. In a crisis, he may give a helping hand, win the support of an
assembly or a mob, direct, high-handedly and for a few weeks, an
executive committee. But regular, persistent labor is repugnant to him;
he is not made for bookkeeping,[3174] for paper and administrative work.
Never, like Robespierre and Billaud can he attend to both official and
police duties at the same time, carefully reading minute daily reports,
annotating mortuary lists, extemporizing ornate abstractions, coolly
enunciating falsehoods and acting out the patient, satisfied inquisitor;
and especially, he can never become the systematic executioner.--On the
one hand, his eyes are not obscured by the gray veil of theory: he does
not regard men through the "Contrat-Social" as a sum of arithmetical
units,[3175] but as they really are, living, suffering, shedding their
blood, especially those he knows, each with his peculiar physiognomy and
demeanor. Compassion is excited by all this when one has any feeling,
and he had. Danton had a heart; he had the quick sensibilities of a man
of flesh and blood stirred by the primitive instincts, the good ones
along with the bad ones, instincts which culture had neither impaired
nor deadened, which allowed him to plan and permit the September
massacre, but which did not allow him to practice daily and blindly,
systematic and wholesale murder. Already in September, "cloaking his
pity under his bellowing,"[3176] he had shielded or saved many eminent
men from the butchers. When the axe is about to fall on the Girondists,
he is "ill with grief" and despair. "I am unable to save them," he
exclaimed, " and big tears streamed down his cheeks."--On the other
hand, his eyes are not covered by the bandage of incapacity or lack of
fore-thought. He detected the innate vice of the system, the inevitable
and approaching suicide of the Revolution.

"The Girondists forced us to throw ourselves upon the sans-culotterie
which has devoured them, which will devour us, and which will eat itself
up."[3177]--"Let Robespierre and Saint-Just alone, and there will
soon be nothing left in France but a Thebiad of political
Trappists."[3178]--At the end, he sees more clearly still:

"On a day like this I organized the Revolutionary Tribunal: I ask pardon
for it of God and man.--In Revolutions, authority remains with the
g