e them credit for it, as nothing is
so likely to make them persevere, as the hope that their reputation is
yet retrievable. On this principle the aristocrats are the eulogists of
Tallien, while the Jacobins remind him hourly of the massacres of the
priests, and his official conduct as Secretary to the municipality or
Paris.*

* Tallien was Seecretary to the Commune of Paris in 1792, and on the
thirty-first of August he appeared at the bar of the Legislative
Assembly with an address, in which he told them "he had caused the
refractory priests to be arrested and confined, and that in a few
days the Land of Liberty should be freed of them."--The massacres of
the prisons began two days after!

As soon as a Representative is convicted of harbouring an opinion
unfavourable to pillage or murder, he is immediately declared an
aristocrat; or, if the Convention happen for a moment to be influenced by
reason or justice, the hopes and fears of both parties are awakened by
suspicions that the members are converts to royalism.--For my own part,
I believe they are and will be just what their personal security and
personal interest may suggest, though it is but a sorry sort of panegyric
on republican ethics to conclude, that every one who manifests the least
symptom of probity or decency, must of course be a royalist or an
aristocrat.

Notwithstanding the harmony which appears to subsist between the
Convention and the people, the former is much less popular in detail than
in the gross. Almost every member who has been on mission, is accused of
dilapidations and cruelties so heinous, that, if they had not been
committed by Representans du Peuple, the criminal courts would find no
difficulty in deciding upon them.--But as theft or murder does not
deprive a member of his privileges, complaints of this nature are only
cognizable by the Assembly, which, being yet in its first days of
regeneration, is rather scrupulous of defending such amusements overtly.
Alarmed, however, at the number, and averse from the precedent of these
denunciations, it has now passed a variety of decrees, which are termed a
guarantee of the national representation, and which in fact guarantee it
so effectually, that a Deputy may do any thing in future with impunity,
provided it does not affect his colleagues. There are now so many forms,
reports, and examinations, that several months may be employed before the
person of a delinquen