brating
between despotism and anarchy. It is the execrable shape of Milton's
Death, "which shape hath none," and which can be described only by its
effects.--For instance, the revolutionary tribunal condemns without
evidence, the revolutionary committees imprison without a charge, and
whatever assumes the title of revolutionary is exonerated from all
subjection to humanity, decency, reason, or justice.--Drowning the
insurgents, their wives and children, by boatloads, is called, in the
dispatch to the Convention, a revolutionary measure--*

* The detail of the horrors committed in La Vendee and at Nantes
were not at this time fully known. Carrier had, however,
acknowledged, in a report read to the Convention, that a boat-load
of refractory priests had been drowned, and children of twelve years
old condemned by a military commission! One Fabre Marat, a
republican General, wrote, about the same period, I think from
Angers, that the Guillotine was too slow, and powder scarce, so that
it was concluded more expedient to drown the rebels, which he calls
a patriotic baptism!--The following is a copy of a letter addressed
to the Mayor of Paris by a Commissary of the Government:

"You will give us pleasure by transmitting the details of your fete at
Paris last decade, with the hymns that were sung. Here we all cried
_"Vive la Republique!"_ as we ever do, when our holy mother Guillotine is
at work. Within these three days she has shaved eleven priests, one
_ci-devant_ noble, a nun, a general, and a superb Englishman, six feet high,
and as he was too tall by a head, we have put that into the sack! At the
same time eight hundred rebels were shot at the Pont du Ce, and their
carcases thrown into the Loire!--I understand the army is on the track of
the runaways. All we overtake we shoot on the spot, and in such numbers
that the ways are heaped with them!"

--At Lyons, it is revolutionary to chain three hundred victims together
before the mouths of loaded cannon, and massacre those who escape the
discharge with clubs and bayonets;* and at Paris, revolutionary juries
guillotine all who come before them.--**

* The Convention formally voted their approbation of this measure,
and Collot d'Herbois, in a report on the subject, makes a kind of
apostrophical panegyric on the humanity of his colleagues. "Which
of you, Citizens, (says he,) would not have fired the