their sole concern.
Provided they were not handed over to the butchers bound hand and foot,
they would open their gates. On these minimum terms the "Mountain" could
terminate the civil war before the end of July. It had only to follow
the example of Robert Lindet who, at Evreux the home of Buzot, at
Caen the home of Charlotte Corday and the central seat of the fugitive
Girondins, established permanent obedience through the moderation he had
shown and the promises he had kept.[1175] The measures that had pacified
the most compromised province would have brought back the others, and
through this policy, Paris, without striking a blow, would have secured
the three largest cities in France, the capital of the South-west, that
of the South, and the capital of the Center.

On the contrary, should Paris persist in imposing on them the domination
of its local Jacobins there was a risk of their being thrown into the
arms of the enemy. Rather than fall back into the hands of the bandits
who had ransomed and decimated them, Toulon, starved out, was about to
receive the English within its walls and surrender to them the great
arsenal of the South. Not less famished, Bordeaux might be tempted to
demand aid from another English fleet; a few marches would brings the
Piedmontese army to Lyons; France would then b cut in two, while the
plan of stirring up the South against the North was proposed to the
allies by the most clear-sighted of their councilors.[1176] Had this
plan been carried out it is probably that the country would have been
lost.--In any event, there was danger in driving the insurgents to
despair: for, between the unbridled dictatorship of their victorious
assassins and the musketry of the besieging army, there could be no
hesitation by men of any feeling; it was better to be beaten on the
ramparts than allow themselves to be bound for the guillotine; brought
to a stand under the scaffold, their sole resource was to depend
on themselves to the last.--Thus, through its unreasonableness, the
"Mountain" condemns itself to a number of sieges or blockades which
lasted several months,[1177] to leaving Var and Savoy unprotected, to
exhausting the arsenals, to employing against Frenchmen[1178] troops
and munitions needed against foreigners, and all this at the moment
the foreigner was taking Valenciennes[1179] and Mayence, when thirty
thousand royalist were organizing in Lozere, when the great Vendean
army was laying siege to N