thing in savage cruelty like men exposed to the delirium of civil or religious hate; and then, above all, we shall be fitted to judge what is the real nature of the counsels of those who are so ready on all occasions to urge every thing on to violence, precipitation, and force; who turn away from all proposals of conciliation and forbearance; who despise all sentiments of caution; who are impetuous, irritable, and daring; who will make no sacrifices to the opinions or interests of others; and who do not scruple about their means, if they think their end good. I speak not of men whose proper element is tumult, who seem able, in some unnatural manner, to behold the shedding of blood without emotion. I speak not of Danton or others; they are fiends in human shape, and we need say no more of them. I speak of men like Barbaroux, and even Vergniaud, and the other Girondists, men of very enlightened and very powerful minds, and I would say of such men (and they are continually appearing in every country, wherever their voice can be heard), that scenes like these are to be their warning and admonition, and that they are not to suppose, that all means are lawful to procure an end because that end is lawful. Making the best of their case, and as far as they are actuated by moral considerations, it is the custom for men like these to conceive anything justifiable which may, according to their notions, ultimately produce the general good; they resolve every thing (as do the French popular historians) into a calculation of utility, and full of their principle, and inattentive to its proper interpretation; they weigh, in a sort of sacrilegious balance, present crime against future happiness; they dye the hands of a populace in blood, that their country hereafter may have a better system of rule; they unchain the savage passions of mankind; they destroy their moral feelings, to take the chance of future law and order; and they regularly sit, and calmly plan and organize a bloody insurrection, of which no one can tell the result, as an allowable means of clearing away the government they see before them. Of such proceedings no one, as I have just said, can tell the result; but be the result what it may, this is not the way in which mankind can be served, this is not to understand the doctrine of utility, and it is to caricature, not exemplify it. Society can never be safe, countries can never be reformed, the cause of improvement can never be patronized, or even tolerated, by people of influence or good sense, if men in pursuit of their political ends, and under the influence of their supposed patriotism, are not to hesitate about their means; if they are to

allow themselves, while they refer every thing to utility, to sink the consideration of all present crimes and horrors for the sake of future good; a future good, of which they, in their own inflamed and enthusiastic state of mind, are to constitute themselves the judges, and which, at all events, they have no right whatever, in this manner, at least, to attempt to procure.

As in private dissensions there are points at which every sane mind stops; as we do not poison our opponents, or assassinate them in the dark, whatever may have been their conduct, and however they may be the objects of our just indignation; so in public concerns-the reformation of the state, the resistance to a bad government, the management of a revolution (if any charge so awful should be at all within our competence), on all such occasions there are points, there are landmarks and boundaries, at which we must necessarily stop. Crimes we must not commit; horrors and atrocities are not to be our expedients; these are to be banished at once as pollutions, to which we are not to familiarize our thoughts for a moment. Our country, if she is to be served at all, must be served in some other manner, for she can never be served in this,-this is not the worship to be offered at the shrine of Liberty. "O Liberty!" said Mr. Roland, as she looked at the statue of Liberty, just at the moment she was to be herself executed, "O Liberty! how many crimes have been perpetrated in thy name!" It will be ever thus. She had herself heard of insurrections without reprobating them. The enlightened men, who with real aspirations after their country's welfare, the first patriots, who first allow crimes to be perpetrated, forget that they are thus setting examples which are sure to be followed by men at every turn, even more and more lawless and inhuman; they forget that crimes produce crimes, with accelerated fury and enhanced guilt; that the man who in private life becomes even a murderer, or in public life, like Robespierre, even a monster and a destroyer of his species, only becomes so, because he proceeds from step to step, because he has not originally stopped in time, because he has not had, from the first, landmarks in his mind of right and wrong, of guilt and innocence, which his mind is on no account ever to be suffered to pass.

It is idle to speak of the good intentions of men; that they endeavoured, at least, well; that their feelings were benevolent; that they were disinterested and pure; that they had hoped better of mankind. Excuses of this kind come too late. Crimes have been committed, horrors and atrocities have been witnessed;

their Revolution fails; a country has been stained for ever in the annals of mankind; the sacred cause of liberty has been made an object of suspicion and terror to the wise and good, and that for ever. These are the events, these the results; and they are the guilty men, they, first and principally, who have tampered with their own moral feelings, who have not recoiled with instinctive abhorrence from the first approach and view of crimes and bloodshed, and who have adopted counsels which could only lead to scenes like these; scenes which it has been our melancholy office to shadow out thus indistinctly to your reflection; scenes which soon exhaust the sensibility of those who attempt to follow them; degradations to our common nature, sufferings, agonies, abominations, which the mind must not be permitted to conceive nor the tongue to tell.

LECTURE XXXI.

MASSACRES OF SEPTEMBER.

SUCH observations as we made at the close of the last lecture, on the subject of the 10th of August, and its moral and political consequences, were but too dreadfully illustrated by the scenes that followed. Barbaroux had not called up the Marseillois in vain; the Girondists succeeded in their object of dethroning the king. You will see what passed in the Legislative Assembly: Vergniaud brought in his decree: a National Convention was to be called, and the king provisionally suspended, and in the meantime he and the royal family were lodged prisoners in the Temple. Whatever, therefore, were their objects, the Girondists could meet with no further resistance from the power of the court; and they had only to recall their three proscribed ministers, Roland, Servan, and Clavière, and defend their country, and reform its constitution, in the manner they thought best.

But the victory thus obtained over the royal power had been purchased too dearly; it had been obtained by mixing themselves with the Jacobins; by assimilating themselves to these furious men in their opinions, and their practice; by making speeches, by adopting and proposing motions favourable to their views; by preparing the way for counsels of violence and blood; by indifference to principle; by forgetting the nature of their means, while ardent for the accomplishment of their ends; and this was to purchase their victory too dearly. It must ever be

so. This species of conduct had been unhappily too much the fault of the patriots from the first; and the Girondists, like their predecessors, were destined afterwards to witness, and themselves to feel, the effects of all their desertions of duty, their flattery of the populace, and their lawless measures of the 20th of June and 10th of August.

For you will now see in the histories, first what miserable scenes were witnessed with regard to the unfortunate Swiss, who had survived the attack on the Tuileries; and you will next see the Legislative Assembly, itself, totally overshadowed and set aside by the new commune, which you may remember, in the course of the night of the 10th, usurped the powers of the existing commune, sent for Mandat from the palace, and murdered him on the staircase. And in the course of the history of a few weeks more, you will have to hear of atrocities, such as no age and country had ever before exhibited: men regularly massacred to the amount of many hundreds, day after day, for four days together; the city of Paris looking on, and the Assembly not succeeding in any efforts they were able or willing to make, to put a stop to such scenes of guilt and horror. These are very dreadful illustrations of such observations, as we have made, of the manner in which men may be hurried on, from one crime to another, the loss of all moral sensibility that soon takes place in the mind that has once submitted to a guilty impulse, and the extreme caution with which the principle of the public good is to be appealed to, more particularly in seasons of a revolutionary nature; the principle itself being indisputable, the principle of benevolence, and a moral principle, but one, the nature and application of which it is of the utmost moment properly to understand, and very easy to mistake.

The Girondists and others, though ready to accomplish their measure, the dethronement of the king, by the insurrection of the 10th of August, or by any violation of law and order that might be necessary, were desirous to have law and order restored, when they had effected their purpose; and therefore it was among the first objects of the Legislative Assembly, to get rid of the new commune, which in the night of the 10th of August, had erected itself in so illegal a manner. To this, however, the commune itself was not disposed to agree; and the first great subject to which your attention should be directed, is the struggle between the commune and the Assembly.

The Assembly attempted, as you will see, to create a fresh commune, and in a regular manner. But no; the existing com

VOL. II.

H

mune maintained its usurpation, and came forward with an address to the Assembly, full of that sentiment which we have noticed, as so liable to be abused and misapplied. You will see all through the address, that the plea of the public good was thought a sufficient solution of every difficulty. Identifying themselves with the people, taking that question, as usual, for granted, the commune in their address to the Assembly observed: "The people, obliged to watch over its own safety, has provided for it by its delegates: obliged to have recourse to the most vigorous measures to save the state, it is necessary that those, whom it has chosen for its magistrates, should have that plenitude of power which befits the sovereign. When the people have saved the country, when you have decreed a National Convention, what have you to do but to attend to their wishes? Are you afraid of reposing on the wisdom of the people, who watch over the safety of the country, a safety which cannot be accomplished without them ?"

This was the language; and the address ended by desiring that no new commune should be attempted. The Assembly gave way. Its leading statesmen and orators had promoted, directly or indirectly, the insurrection of the 10th of August; and the commune, so instrumental in its success, could not now be put down. But to what a state of degradation was the Legislative Assembly of a great kingdom thus reduced-to be rivalled, or rather themselves to be put down by a set of nightly ruffians, who assume the municipal authority, and begin their proceedings by sending for the existing commandant, and shooting him as he leaves their room, that they may appoint another more fitted for their purposes.

From the day of the 10th of August, the first result of the sacrifices that had been made to procure the events connected with it, was, that the commune of Paris became the true sovereign, under the direction, chiefly, of Danton, Tallien, Manuel, and Robespierre; and that the National Assembly might be said to have expired. These were, indeed, but the beginnings of sorrows. We are at last to be conducted to the massacres of September. But the revolutionary march of lawless men, the struggle between the Assembly and the commune, is among the lessons of these times; and the student must, therefore, in the first place, observe it very carefully. The commune having maintained its usurped existence, the two great points to be next accomplished were, first to get possession of the police, and then to erect a revolutionary tribunal. All power, with the power of life and death, would be thus lodged in their hands.