in his hand, led the onset. Billaud followed;
and then all that infinite hatred which had long been kept down by
terror burst forth, and swept every barrier before it. When at length
the voice of Robespierre, drowned by the president's bell and by shouts
of "Down with the tyrant!" had died away in hoarse gasping, Barere rose.
He began with timid and doubtful phrases, watched the effect of every
word he uttered, and, when the feeling of the Assembly had been
unequivocally manifested, declared against Robespierre. But it was not
till the people out of doors, and especially the gunners of Paris, had
espoused the cause of the Convention that Barere felt quite at ease.
Then he sprang to the tribune, poured forth a Carmagnole about
Pisistratus and Catiline, and concluded by moving that the heads of
Robespierre and Robespierre's accomplices should be cut off without a
trial. The motion was carried. On the following morning the vanquished
members of the Committee of Public Safety and their principal adherents
suffered death. It was exactly one year since Barere had commenced his
career of slaughter by moving the proscription of his old allies the
Girondists. We greatly doubt whether any human being has ever succeeded
in packing more wickedness into the space of three hundred and
sixty-five days.

The ninth of Thermidor is one of the great epochs in the history of
Europe. It is true that the three members of the Committee of Public
Safety who triumphed were by no means better men than the three who
fell. Indeed, we are inclined to think that of these six statesmen the
least bad were Robespierre and St. Just, whose cruelty was the effect of
sincere fanaticism operating on narrow understandings and acrimonious
tempers. The worst of the six was, beyond all doubt, Barere, who had no
faith in any part of the system which he upheld by persecution; who,
while he sent his fellow creatures to death for being the third cousins
of royalists, had not in the least made up his mind that a republic was
better than a monarchy; who, while he slew his old friends for
federalism, was himself far more a federalist than any of them; who had
become a murderer merely for his safety, and who continued to be a
murderer merely for his pleasure.

The tendency of the vulgar is to embody everything. Some individual is
selected, and often selected very injudiciously, as the representative
of every great movement of the public mind, of every great revolutio