ey collected by every art
of rapine; and that they were ready, in support of their cause, to mount
the scaffold with as much indifference as they showed when they signed
the death-warrants of aristocrats and priests. But no great party can be
composed of such materials as these. It is the inevitable law that such
zealots as we have described shall collect around them a multitude
of slaves, of cowards, and of libertines, whose savage tempers and
licentious appetites, withheld only by the dread of law and magistracy
from the worst excesses, are called into full activity by the hope of
immunity. A faction which, from whatever motive, relaxes the great laws
of morality is certain to be joined by the most immoral part of the
community. This has been repeatedly proved in religious wars. The war
of the Holy Sepulchre, the Albigensian war, the Huguenot war, the
Thirty Years' war, all originated in pious zeal. That zeal inflamed
the champions of the Church to such a point that they regarded all
generosity to the vanquished as a sinful weakness. The infidel, the
heretic, was to be run down like a mad dog. No outrage committed by the
Catholic warrior on the miscreant enemy could deserve punishment. As
soon as it was known that boundless license was thus given to barbarity
and dissoluteness, thousands of wretches who cared nothing for the
sacred cause, but who were eager to be exempted from the police of
peaceful cities, and the discipline of well-governed camps, flocked
to the standard of the faith. The men who had set up that statute were
sincere, chaste, regardless of lucre, and perhaps, where only themselves
were concerned, not unforgiving; but round that standard were assembled
such gangs of rogues, ravishers, plunderers, and ferocious bravoes, as
were scarcely ever found under the flag of any state engaged in a mere
temporal quarrel. In a very similar way was the Jacobin party composed.
There was a small nucleus of enthusiasts; round that nucleus was
gathered a vast mass of ignoble depravity; and in all that mass there
was nothing so depraved and so ignoble as Barere.

Then came those days when the most barbarous of all codes was
administered by the most barbarous of all tribunals; when no man could
greet his neighbours, or say his prayers, or dress his hair, without
danger of committing a capital crime; when spies lurked in every corner;
when the guillotine was long and hard at work every morning; when the
jails were filled