At last, after many weeks of struggle and intrigue, the crisis came. At the end of February, St. Just returned to Paris from a mission in the provinces, and brought a new influence to bear upon events. St. Just was the loyal disciple of Robespierre, but he possessed far more energy and decision than his chief. He shared Robespierre's dislike of Hébert, but he did not share his kindly feeling towards Danton. Desmoulins had ridiculed the stiff pomposity of the young Committee-man's demeanour, and to St. Just ridicule was an unpardonable wrong. While Robespierre pleaded indisposition and held aloof from the meetings of the Committee, St. Just declared himself without disguise. He proposed to enforce the authority of the Government by sacrificing Dantonistsand Hébertists alike. He denounced significantly 'the greatest criminals, who are only trying to destroy the scaffold because they dread the prospect of mounting it themselves.' His presence seems to have roused his colleagues, as the arrival of Collot had roused them before. The Commune was once more made to feel the weight of the Committee's authority. A decree of the Convention confiscated the property of the suspects in order to provide for destitute patriots, and by this great bribe diminished the influence which the Commune enjoyed with the needy poor. The Hébertists, now thoroughly alarmed, made a last effort to assert themselves. They held stormy meetings at the Cordeliers Club, and indulged in reckless schemes of insurrection. But even Collot d'Herbois seems to have felt that the leaders of the Commune had gone too far, and he gave his consent to the policy of the Committee. St. Just took the lead in the attack. On the night of the 13th March, Hébert and his principal colleagues were arrested. Next day, Robespierre reappeared in the Convention and resumed his place at the Jacobin Club. For the first time in the history of the Revolution the less extreme party, with legitimate authority behind it, had asserted itself against the forces of insurrection, had assumed the offensive and had won the day.
On the one side the enemies of the Government had fallen. It only remained for them to dispose of the rest. The extreme Terrorists had consented to allow their friends in the Commune to perish, but only on condition that the advocates of mercy should perish too. The moderate party had many supporters in the Convention,and were a serious danger to the supremacy of the Committee. They counted on the support of Danton, and though Danton gave them little encouragement, they used his great name to forward their designs. 'Danton sleeps,' said Desmoulins, as he took up his pen again to attack the system and the agents of the Terror, 'Danton sleeps, but it is the sleep of a lion, and he will wake to defend us.' But Danton's power and energy seemed destined never to wake again. Heartily weary of conspiracies and factions, discerning plainly enough the danger which confronted him but unable to rouse himself to avert it, disdaining to take measures to defend himself or to fight his opponents with their own weapons of intrigue, Danton remained undecided and inert. He would not compass his enemies' destruction, and he did not believe that his enemies would dare to compass his. Perhaps he relied on Robespierre's friendship, and forgot that Robespierre was not the man to risk his own ascendency in order to save another's life. At any rate when the crisis came, Robespierre swallowed any scruples that he felt, and consented to unite the Government by abandoning Danton to his opponents. On the night of the 30th March, Danton, Desmoulins and their colleagues were arrested, and next day Robespierre came forward and denounced the 'broken idol' in the Convention. Danton's bearing before the Revolutionary Tribunal was marked by his habitual scornful courage. 'My abode,' he said, in answer to the judge's questions, 'will soon be in eternity; my name you will find in the Pantheon of history.' He defended himself hotly and proudly against the ridiculous charges of royalistconspiracy. His vigorous eloquence created so profound an impression that his accusers trembled for the consequences, and took exceptional measures to cut the trial short. On the 5th April, Danton was guillotined. 'I see now,' he said, 'that in times of Revolution, power falls ultimately to the greatest scoundrels.... Ah, better be a poor fisherman than meddle with the governing of men!'
The fall of Danton left Robespierre by far the most conspicuous man in France. For character and reputation he had no rival in the Committees, and it was largely on his popularity that the Government rested for support. In some points Robespierre compared favourably with his colleagues. His life was frugal, pure and decent. His dress was always neat. His sense of decorum never deserted him. His devotion to his principles and his hatred of license and irreverence were sincere. He represented admirably the complacent Philistinism of a certain type of French bourgeois. His language breathed of virtue and emotion. His long-winded, didactic generalities, his perpetual appeals to morality and conscience imposed on well-intentioned, narrow minds, and, no doubt, imposed upon his own. Robespierre's followers, women especially, with whom his influence was great, took him at his own valuation. They did not discover his amazing egotism. They did not resent the qualities which make him appear to us the typical prig of history. They liked the long abstract discourses, which were the fashion of his time and sect. They liked his plain respectability. They liked his war upon corruption. They liked his feeling for religion and his copious sentiment. They were charmed by hishigh-sounding and unpractical ideals. They marvelled when he recited, as he never tired of doing, the tale of his own virtues. Robespierre was essentially a priest, and he exercised a priest's fascination, preaching unceasingly and claiming without scruple the admiration of his flock. 'I have never bowed,' he cried, 'beneath the yoke of baseness and corruption.' 'Surrounded by assassins, I have little to reconcile me to life except my love for my country and my thirst for justice.' 'I am a living martyr to the Republic, at once the victim and the enemy of crime.' 'If such truths must be dissembled, then bring me the hemlock.' He was for ever proclaiming himself the champion of morality, for ever protesting his readiness to die in its cause. He reiterated it so often, and he believed it so intensely, that he made his followers believe it too.
Moreover, Robespierre's sentiment was genuine. He had brought with him from Arras the reputation of a young provincial lawyer, upright, industrious and tender-hearted, fond of indifferent verse and of pet-birds. In his early days he had resigned an honourable office rather than condemn a man to death. He had from the first figured as the friend of humanity, as the defender of the unfortunate and the oppressed. If any question arose of suppressing disorder, he had always raised his voice against severity. He had pleaded for the abolition of the penalty of death. He had championed the cause of coloured men. He had more than once shown his sympathy for priests. Later on, he had defended the seventy-three members of the Convention, who were attacked for protesting against the arrest of theGironde. He was known to have resented the treatment of Madame Elizabeth and the insults offered by Hébert to the Queen. He had taken no part personally in the enormities of the proconsuls of the Terror. He had repudiated the immorality and materialism of the leaders of the Commune. He had helped to secure the recall of Carrier. Conscious cruelty had no place in his speeches or ideals.
But when one turns from Robespierre's speeches to his actions, a different tale is told. In vain his apologists recapitulate his language, and dwell on his protestations of virtue, on his ceaseless iteration of benevolent designs. His career stands out in flagrant contrast to his oft-repeated principles, and the record of his career no apologies can explain away. The most noticeable characteristics of Robespierre's public life were his lack of initiative, his disingenuous reserve, and his profound incompetence as a practical politician. There is hardly a single great measure of the Terror, except the development of the Revolutionary Tribunal, in which Robespierre took a leading part. His method was to combat every proposal and every party, but rarely to make a proposal himself. If a critical occasion came, Robespierre always waited to see the issue before he declared himself. He never threw off his nervous hesitation. He never committed himself to violent risks, or took the initiative in violent courses. These characteristics are illustrated at each stage of his career. In the difficult days of July, 1791, at the time of the 'Massacre of the Champ de Mars,' he conducted himself with exemplary caution. A year later, on the 10th August, he remainedin the background till the battle was decided, but he joined the Commune openly on the 11th, when the victory was won. Later still, though he detested the doctrines of the Hébertists, he did not venture to attack them straightforwardly. He only threw out hints against them until he saw which way the tide was running, and then he tried to discredit them by arguing that atheism was an aristocratic idea! He was absent, on the plea of illness, while their fate was being decided in the Committee, but he was well enough to re-appear in public the morning after their arrest. He encouraged Desmoulins cordially in his crusade against the Commune; but he changed his tone as soon as Collot d'Herbois' reappearance turned the scale against Desmoulins' views, and he finally threw over without a struggle the man who had been for years his warm admirer and friend. With equal treachery he sacrificed Danton as soon as it was evident that the strongest party was bent on Danton's destruction, and directly the arrest was made, he came forward to denounce a colleague, at whose side, only a few weeks before, he had proudly asked to stand. Of course it is possible that Robespierre was able, with his remarkable faculty of self-deception, to persuade his conscience in every case that he was acting as the interests of virtue required. But it is difficult by any sophisms to excuse such heartless opportunism, and to avoid the conviction that, whoever fell, Robespierre was determined to be upon the winning side.
Hardly less noticeable than his tortuous manœuvring was his incompetence in practical affairs. His speeches were treatises full of vague and abstract speculation, inwhich the same forms and phrases constantly appeared, but singularly lacking in definiteness and meaning, with very little bearing upon facts, and generally without any practical conclusions or result. He seemed to talk for the sake of talking, but the listeners, who accepted his theory as their gospel, never seemed to tire of the voice of the priest. At the height of the struggle between the rival parties in January, 1794, Robespierre solemnly invited the Jacobins to consider 'the crimes of the English Government and the vices of the British Constitution.' At another time of stirring interest and activity, he busied himself with drawing up a lengthy indictment of the monarchs of the world. At another time, he contributed to a practical discussion some luminous remarks, in which he insisted that the outbreak of the Revolution had been largely due to the determination of 'the London Cabinet ... to place the Duke of York on the throne of Louis XVI,' and that Pitt was 'an imbecile ... who, abusing the influence acquired by him on an island placed haphazard in the ocean,' conceived plans only worthy of a madhouse. It is no wonder if his colleagues in the Government, who were nearly all of them vigorous men of action, came to regard him with something like contempt. All through the Revolution Robespierre's attitude was the same. He never displayed much practical ability. The overthrow of the monarchy, the establishment of the Republic, the defeat of the invaders, the triumph of the Revolutionary Government, the organisation of the national defence, owed little to him. On the Committee of Public Safety his services, apart from matters of police, were unimportant. He didlittle useful work himself, and his jealous interference only hampered and embarrassed those who did. He never went on mission. The equipment of the army and navy, the management of the food supply, the control of the proconsuls, the administration of the country, the heroic labours of the terrible Committee, rested in other hands. Robespierre was only its tireless rhetorician, watching, manœuvring, expatiating incessantly on his ideals, his virtues and himself. Even after the fall of Danton, when he had ample scope for his designs, all that he contributed as a practical reformer to the Utopia which he had described a hundred times, was a masquerade to the discredit of religion and the most sanguinary police-law which the world has seen.
But wrapped as Robespierre was in self-complacency, he was always sufficiently awake to suspect and envy others. The doctrine of mistrust was a part of the Jacobin creed. The habit of suspecting others seemed to grow upon all those who professed the faith, and gradually to distort their views and to discolour their judgment. The Robespierre of 1794, the jealous, nervous, inflated fanatic, was a very different being from the earnest, narrow-minded lawyer, who had set out from Arras five years before to take his part in regenerating France. As Marat had developed, under the influence of the Jacobin theory and amid the desperate excitements of the time, from a soured idealist into the furious advocate of murder, so Robespierre had developed too. The mania of panic and suspicion had settled upon him. The peril which he and his colleagues encountered had convinced him that he was a martyr, and that all who did notrecognise his virtues were conspirators seeking for his death. 'Gazing on the multitude of vices which the torrent of the Revolution has rolled down,' he cried in his last great speech in the Convention, 'I have sometimes trembled lest I should be soiled by the impure neighbourhood of wicked men.... I know that it is easy for the leagued tyrants of the world to overwhelm a single individual; but I know also what is the duty of a man who can die in defence of humanity.' In the latter part of Robespierre's career it seemed that nothing was too innocent for him to mistrust or too improbable for him to suspect. 'I am not obliged to reflect,' he told Garat, 'I always rely on first impressions.' He believed that his instinct could not err, and his instinct always was to think the worst. 'Evidently,' he said one day to Garat, early in the spring of 1793, 'the Girondists are conspiring.' 'Where?' asked Garat. 'Everywhere,' answered Robespierre. He needed no facts to prove it. His virtue, the watchdog of the Republic, told him it was true. At one moment Lafayette was the traitor, at another Brissot, at another Dumouriez, at another Hébert. Servan, he insisted, was given a command in the Pyrenees, in order to hand over the keys of France to Spain. 'Is there no doubt of this in your mind?' asked Garat. 'None whatever,' replied the infallible pedant. Again and again Robespierre denounced mysterious conspiracies and treasons in Paris, in the departments, in the Commune, in the Convention. He had no doubt whatever that he was unmasking traitors, and traitors he could not scruple to send to the guillotine. In particular, the generals of the Republic were singled out by Robespierre as objectsof alarm. It was he who sent Custine to the scaffold, and scouted the suggestion that it was necessary to offer written proofs of his guilt. It was he who took the chief part in denouncing Houchard and in consigning him to a similar fate. It was he who first threw doubts on the good faith of Kellermann. It was he who, upon no evidence whatever, ordered the arrest of Hoche upon a charge of treason[11].
The growth of this fever of suspicion, which was common to most of the Jacobin party, but which was specially marked in Marat and in Robespierre, enables one to understand how a man naturally neither cruel nor unprincipled became so largely responsible for the bloodshed of the Terror. Robespierre's apologists have vainly endeavoured to defend him against this reproach, and to maintain that he always wished to stop it. But even their defence of Robespierre contains conclusive evidence of his guilt. His position, after the fall of Danton, was unquestionably strong. In the two governing Committees, though he had enemies and critics, he was closely supported by Couthon and St. Just. His popularity in Paris was considerable. His reputation within his own party stood higher than that of any of his colleagues. The Jacobin Club was his stronghold. On the triumph of the Committee in March, 1794, the Commune had been reconstituted, and its new heads,Fleuriot and Payan, were devoted to Robespierre's interest. The Revolutionary Army of the capital had been dissolved, but Hanriot, Robespierre's firm friend, retained his command in the National Guard, and was zealous in Robespierre's service. The ministries also had been suppressed. Twelve new commissions had been appointed to administer affairs in their place, and in the appointments to these commissions Robespierre's influence was naturally large. Had Robespierre really cared to use his power to mitigate the Terror, it is difficult to believe that he could not have done so with success. In the existing state of public opinion he could, for such an enterprise, have commanded overwhelming support. The great majority of the Convention, as their conduct both before and after proved, were only waiting for an opportunity to throw their weight into the scale of mercy.
But the fact is that Robespierre's influence was used throughout in the opposite direction. He detested, it is true, the disorderly excesses that had accompanied the Terror in the departments. He wished to centralise and regulate the system, to make it uniform, moral and decorous, to take the power of the sword out of the hands of men whom he distrusted and disliked. But he did not wish to end it. The police-law of April, 1794, which directed that all conspirators should be brought to Paris for trial, and the establishment of a new Bureau of police under the supervision of St. Just and of Robespierre himself, were designed to prevent the occurrence of enormities like those of Carrier in the provinces, and to deprive Robespierre's opponents inthe Committee of General Security of their monopoly in matters of police. But they were not measures of compassion. From the first, Robespierre had taken a prominent part in founding and developing the Revolutionary Tribunal. Again and again he had protested against its delays and its unnecessary forms. When he attained the climax of his power, he swept those forms away. In the Revolutionary Tribunal he had staunch adherents. His work in the Committee of Public Safety was always largely concerned with questions of police. The Terror was an essential part of his system. He honestly believed that his Utopia could not flourish until he had consumed the wicked, and against the wicked accordingly he sharpened the sword of death.
With this crusade against the enemies of his ideal he mingled schemes of arbitrary benevolence. Both St. Just and Robespierre were determined to found the State which Rousseau had conceived, wherein all should be equal, virtuous, enlightened, without poverty or riches, irreverence or sin. As a step towards it they determined to establish Rousseau's Church. On the 18th Floréal (7th May), Robespierre induced the Convention to decree its belief in a Supreme Being and in the immortality of the soul. On the 20th Prairial (8th June), he celebrated, in one of the strangest pageants of history, the festival of the new Deity in France. Arrayed in a brilliant uniform, and carrying a bouquet of flowers and corn sheaves, Robespierre marched at the head of a procession out to the Champ de Mars, burned the symbols of Atheism and Vice, and inaugurated the new religion. 'Here,' he cried, 'is the Universe assembled.O Nature, how sublime, how exquisite, thy power! How tyrants will pale at the tidings of our feast.' And within two days of this ideal festival he set to work to re-organise the machinery of the guillotine. A few weeks before he had taken a chief part in establishing, on the demand of his adherent Maignet, an extraordinary tribunal at Orange in the South, and had drawn up with his own hand a paper of instructions, which laid it down that the conscience of the judges was to be the only test of the guilt of the accused. In the law of the 22nd Prairial this monstrous principle was carried further. The decree provided that the Revolutionary Tribunal should be divided into four sections to expedite its work, that prisoners should thenceforward be tried in batches, that they should no longer have counsel to defend them or be allowed to call witnesses for their defence, and that the question of their guilt should be left to the enlightened conscience of the jury! The results of this proposal were that, in the six or seven weeks which followed, the number of victims guillotined mounted to over thirteen hundred, a number considerably exceeding the total reached during the first fifteen months of the tribunal's existence. In face of this measure, which was unquestionably Robespierre's work, it is idle to pretend that he wished to check the Terror. No doubt he disliked its extravagance and license. No doubt he wished to strike some of the Terrorists. But apart from that there is no evidence that he attempted to stop it, and against him there is the whole tenour of his policy and the testimony of this nefarious decree.
But Robespierre's ascendency was destined to bebrief. The majority of his colleagues had begun to dread him. They knew that he was jealous of their authority. After the 10th June he held himself more and more aloof[12]. He did not resign his place on the Committee; but finding that he could not make its members accept his ascendency, he began to form schemes for purging the Government afresh, to dissociate himself from his colleagues, and to concentrate his forces in the Commune and at the Jacobin Club. At last, aware that a breach was inevitable, St. Just and others urged him to take vigorous measures against his opponents. But Robespierre, always incapable of decisive action, preferred to confine himself to speeches and to vague hints of conspiracy and treason. On the 8th Thermidor (26th July), in a long and mysterious speech, marked by his habitual and astonishing egotism, he denounced the plots against the Convention, and demanded the punishment of evil men. But he named no one, and his threats frightened all. That night the combination which had been gradually forming against him came to a head. Tallien, Billaud, Bourdon and others, Dantonists and Hébertists, all parties alike determined to unite, to save their lives. On the morrow, the 9th Thermidor, the crisis came, and the Convention, foronce acting with unanimity and vigour, rejected Robespierre's appeal and boldly ordered his arrest. For a few hours the issue of the struggle hung doubtful. The Commune rallied to Robespierre's defence. He was delivered from prison and carried to the Hôtel de Ville in triumph. Hanriot summoned his artillerymen to the rescue, and once again the Commune proposed to raise an insurrection. But the name of the Commune was no longer a watchword in the capital. The Convention held its ground with unusual courage. It outlawed all the chief conspirators. It took prompt measures to organise resistance, to rouse Paris, to summon the forces of the Sections to its aid. The prestige of the National Assembly, when united, was still redoubtable, and Hanriot's troops hesitated to attack it. Early in the dawn of the following day the Conventional forces assumed the offensive, and marched on the Hôtel de Ville. The insurrection collapsed, and Robespierre and his confederates died. At last the lawful authority in France, so long paralysed and broken, had dared to act decisively, and to use force to make itself obeyed. From the moment that its vigour revived its triumph was assured, and with its triumph the reaction began.
FOOTNOTES:[11]Even M. Hamel admits this (Hist. de Robespierre, III. p. 499et seq.), although he endeavours, in a manner that is not convincing, to throw the responsibility on to Carnot. Carnot claimed to have saved Hoche's life. He certainly joined in ordering his release from prison almost immediately after Robespierre's fall.[12]Robespierre himself said, on the 8th Thermidor, that for the last six weeks he had 'absolutely abandoned his functions as a member of the Committee of Public Safety.' Louis Blanc argues that he was therefore not responsible for the Terror. But another of Robespierre's admirers, Hamel, has taken pains to prove that Robespierre was constantly present at the Committee's meetings up to the 9th Thermidor, and decides that his alleged retirement must consequently have been 'toute morale' (vol. III. pp. 594-601).
FOOTNOTES:
[11]Even M. Hamel admits this (Hist. de Robespierre, III. p. 499et seq.), although he endeavours, in a manner that is not convincing, to throw the responsibility on to Carnot. Carnot claimed to have saved Hoche's life. He certainly joined in ordering his release from prison almost immediately after Robespierre's fall.
[11]Even M. Hamel admits this (Hist. de Robespierre, III. p. 499et seq.), although he endeavours, in a manner that is not convincing, to throw the responsibility on to Carnot. Carnot claimed to have saved Hoche's life. He certainly joined in ordering his release from prison almost immediately after Robespierre's fall.
[12]Robespierre himself said, on the 8th Thermidor, that for the last six weeks he had 'absolutely abandoned his functions as a member of the Committee of Public Safety.' Louis Blanc argues that he was therefore not responsible for the Terror. But another of Robespierre's admirers, Hamel, has taken pains to prove that Robespierre was constantly present at the Committee's meetings up to the 9th Thermidor, and decides that his alleged retirement must consequently have been 'toute morale' (vol. III. pp. 594-601).
[12]Robespierre himself said, on the 8th Thermidor, that for the last six weeks he had 'absolutely abandoned his functions as a member of the Committee of Public Safety.' Louis Blanc argues that he was therefore not responsible for the Terror. But another of Robespierre's admirers, Hamel, has taken pains to prove that Robespierre was constantly present at the Committee's meetings up to the 9th Thermidor, and decides that his alleged retirement must consequently have been 'toute morale' (vol. III. pp. 594-601).
CHAPTER XI.
The Reaction.
Withthe fall of Robespierre the Terror came to an end. The men who overthrew him were many of them worse men than he. They did not intend to repudiate his system. They had acted from personal motives, from a desire to save their lives and to maintain themselves in power. But without Robespierre the Terror could not continue. It was his reputation for moral earnestness and for disinterested conviction which alone had reconciled to it many honest, narrow-minded men, who accepted his theory, believed in his sincerity, and had not the capacity to criticise his actions. In him and his associates the principles of the Terror perished. There remained no one to throw over the system the veil of sentimental virtue, and without that veil its uglier aspects stood disclosed. Men who to the last had respected Robespierre could not respect Collot d'Herbois or Billaud-Varennes. The Convention which had revolted against Robespierre was not likely, when once it had tasted freedom, to replace on its neck the yoke of his colleagues. The Committee of Public Safety had appeared irresistible so long as it was undivided. Butwhen it broke up into parties and appealed to the Convention to protect it, its dictatorship necessarily expired.
Accordingly, in the weeks which followed the 9th Thermidor, a number of measures testified to the growing reaction. The Committee of Public Safety was remodelled, and a system was enforced under which three of its members retired, without the right of re-election, every month. The Convention and its Committees resumed the powers of government. The Revolutionary Tribunal was reconstituted and the law of the 22nd Prairial repealed. The redoubtable Commune was abolished, and for purposes of local government Paris was placed under the authority of the Department of the Seine. The staff of the National Guard was reorganised. The Revolutionary Committees in Paris and elsewhere were reduced in number and shorn of their powers. The meetings of the Sections were limited to three a month, and the decree which provided a payment of forty sous for all citizens who attended them was repealed. In the departments the officials of the Communes and of the Clubs were sifted and replaced. Everywhere the prison doors were opened and hundreds of prisoners were set free. Before the end of August, voices were raised in the Convention against the Terrorists who continued in the Government, and at the beginning of September, Billaud-Varennes, Collot d'Herbois and the remaining Terrorists retired.
As the autumn went on, the pace of the reaction increased. The Jacobins, it is true, were still numerous and active. Although the reputation of the leading Terrorists was shaken, the Mountain was still a force in the Convention. Besides the members of the old Committees, many deputies, like Romme and Soubrany, Goujon and Bourbotte, maintained without flinching extreme Jacobin views. Others, like Thuriot and Cambon, were not prepared to go too far with the reaction. The Jacobin Club, though weakened by the fall of Robespierre, had resumed its old activity, and, supported by some of its confederates in the provinces, determined not to surrender its power without a struggle. Billaud-Varennes declared passionately that the old lion was not dead. But the tide flowed heavily against the Mountain. The majority of the Convention was determined at all costs to break with the system of the Terror. The deputies of the Right and of the Centre recovered their voices under the courageous leadership of Boissy-d'Anglas and Thibeaudeau. The Thermidorians, under Tallien and Fréron, rallied to the side of the moderate members, and gathered round them many old Dantonists and many old adherents of the Mountain, Legendre, Lecointre and Bourdon de l'Oise, Merlin of Thionville and Merlin of Douai, Cambacères, and André Dumont. Sieyès, released from the necessity of silence, brought to the same side his affectation of inscrutable wisdom. Encouraged by the divisions in the Assembly, public opinion expressed itself outside. The independence of the Press revived. Fréron's paper, theOrateur du Peupleboldly took the lead of the reactionary journals. The trial of the prisoners sent up from Nantes to be tried at Paris revealed for the first time to the public the worst iniquities of Carrier's rule, and in the weeks and months which followed, evidence began to pour in against the agents of the Terror. The indignation against theTerrorists in Paris increased every day. Reactionary feeling showed itself overwhelmingly strong in the Sections, in the cafés, in the streets. Bodies of young men, some of them men of family and wealth, but most of them drawn from the ranks of tradesmen, clerks and artisans, representing the great majority of respectable people which had allowed itself to be tyrannised over so long, and which had shown its readiness to rise as early as May, 1793, gathering in the Palais Royal, once the headquarters of revolutionary agitation, organised themselves into an effective force, armed themselves with short and heavy sticks, and led by Lacretelle and encouraged by Fréron and Tallien, began to parade the streets, to suppress Jacobin speakers and meetings, to pour contempt on Jacobin opinions, and to wage war against Jacobinism in whatever shape it might be found. Extravagant and ridiculous in some respects the 'Jeunes Gens' were, and in later days it suited the Thermidorians to turn their affectation into ridicule, and to denounce them as 'Jeunesse Dorée,' as 'Elégants' and Muscadins.' But in their origin at any rate they represented a genuine popular movement, and up to April, 1795, they acted cordially with the moderate party, and rendered valuable service in destroying the terrorism which the Jacobins had established in Paris. With the new movement a new song came into fashion, and the Jeunes Gens, rejecting the Marseillaise, sang in the streets the 'Réveil du Peuple':—
'Quelle est cette lenteur barbare?Hâte-toi, peuple souverain,De rendre aux monstres de TénareTous ces buveurs de sang humain.'
The reaction in Paris soon made itself felt in the Assembly. The attacks upon the Terrorists and their supporters redoubled. In October a law was passed forbidding the federation of popular clubs. On the 12th November, the Committee of Public Safety announced that it had closed the Jacobin Club. In the same month Carrier was arrested. He was sent for trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal and a few weeks later to the scaffold. On the 8th December, the seventy-three deputies who had been imprisoned for protesting against the expulsion of the Gironde, were readmitted to their places in the Convention. At the end of that month the Assembly decided that there was ground for investigating the charges against Billaud-Varennes, Collot d'Herbois, Vadier and Barère. As the winter went on, the members of the Right, reinforced by the seventy-three, and determined to undo the work of the Terror, demanded a reconsideration of the laws against Emigrants and priests, and the restoration in certain cases of property confiscated for political offences. In February, 1795, the Convention decreed the freedom of all forms of religious opinion; but at the same time it continued the penal enactments against non-juring priests, imposed a variety of restrictions on the exercise of public worship, and, while refusing to contribute towards the maintenance of any religion, retained its hold upon the buildings and property of the old Church. A further advance made in June towards the principles of complete toleration was afterwards repealed by the influence of the Left. On the 2nd March, Legendre carried a motion for the arrest of Billaud-Varennes, Collot d'Herbois, Vadier and Barère.On the 8th, the survivors of the Girondist leaders proscribed on the 31st May, including Isnard, Lanjuinais and Louvet, were recalled to their seats in the Assembly. The triumph of the reaction seemed to be assured.
But the Jacobins were not to fall without a struggle. They had more than once secured the victory by appealing to the physical necessities of the poor, and it was by that means that they endeavoured to conquer again. In the spring of 1795 the distress in Paris was exceptionally keen. With the political reaction an economic reaction had begun. After Thermidor it became evident that the economic system of the Terror could not stand. Its drastic laws were on all sides disregarded. No penalties or prohibitions could force men to observe laws which they were resolutely determined to infringe. The State might fix the price of food, but the producers would not produce it at that price, and when the guillotine had ceased to compel submission, the vain attempts of the State to fix prices broke down. Economic causes more powerful than any laws overthrew the Maximum, and at last, towards the end of December, the Convention recognised the fact and repealed the Maximum decrees. With the repeal of the Maximum the whole system of Terrorist finance collapsed. The practice of requisition was abandoned. The restrictions upon foreign trade and upon the exportation of specie were removed. In a short time the Bourse was reopened. The intrepid experiment by which the economists of the Terror had endeavoured to concentrate in the hands of the Government the whole commercial system of the country, fell to the ground, and the old methods ofmonopoly and competition, which the Terrorists had so constantly denounced, and which they had so boldly but recklessly attacked, reasserted their sway and exacted their penalty. The financial system of the Terror was ruinously mistaken, but by its draconian methods it had to some extent checked the rise in prices, and had perhaps saved from extinction the vanishing credit of the Assignats. Yet even under the Terror the Assignats had deteriorated in value. In spite of the imperious demands of the Terrorist Exchequer, in spite of its forced loans and wholesale confiscations, in spite of the plunder which it drew from its victims and of the money which, as Barère boasted, it coined on the Place de la Révolution, the Jacobin Government had never been free from financial troubles. The non-payment of taxes, the peculation of local authorities, the failure of the forced loans to bring in anything like the sum expected, the depreciation in value of national property, the ignorance of economics which prevailed among the ruling party, and above all the enormous expenses of the war, of the administration, and of supplying Paris and the great towns with food, had created a perpetual deficit. 'The Revolution and the war,' said Cambon, the chief financier of the Terror, in a report of January, 1795, 'have cost in four years five thousand three hundred and fifty millions above the ordinary expenses;' and Cambon's estimate was probably much below the fact. In vain had Cambon by a partial bankruptcy put out of circulation fifteen hundred million francs of Assignats which bore the image of the King. In vain had the Convention, in August 1794, decreed, on Cambon's proposal, the Republicanisationof the National Debt, ordered all the creditors of the State to send in their claims, entered their titles in a Great Ledger of the Public Debt, declared the capital borrowed by the State to be irrecoverable, and, regardless of all engagements entered into and of all promises of high interest previously made, informed them that in future the State would pay five per cent interest to all its creditors alike. This summary method of escaping liabilities had introduced, it is true, some order into the finances, but it had not improved the credit of the State. The chief resource of the Government had continued to be the Assignats, and not even the drastic legislation of the Terror had been able to keep their credit up.
The repeal of that drastic legislation and the financial policy of the Convention in the winter of 1794-95 accelerated their decline[13]. Prices, no longer fixed by law, rose rapidly, as the value of the paper money fell. The Government, no longer able to rely on the methods which the Terrorists had used to swell their income, and face to face with high prices and diminishing credit, could think of no better resource than to issue Assignats faster than before; and of course with every fresh issue the depreciation increased. At the end of 1794, someseven thousand million francs of Assignats were in circulation. In May, 1795, these had risen to ten thousand millions, in the August following, to sixteen thousand millions, and in the October following that, to many thousand millions more. In proportion to these enormous issues, the value of the currency declined. At the end of the reign of Terror, Assignats had been worth 33 or 34 per cent of their nominal value. In December, 1794, they had fallen to 22 per cent. In the ensuing May they stood at 7 per cent, and in the months which followed they fell to 4, to 2, and even to less than 1 per cent. In vain different members of the Convention proposed schemes for diminishing the number. The Government had no other resource to look to, and its expenses seemed daily to increase, as claims for compensation poured in upon it from those who had suffered under the Terror. With the fall of the Assignats, prices rose to an alarming height. All wage-earners who could not raise their wages in proportion to the rapid rise in prices, all who lived upon fixed incomes, all who depended on the paper-money and whose small savings consisted of Assignats, suffered acutely from the economic crisis. A certain number of people, tenant farmers for instance, who paid their rent in Assignats, and who made it many times over by the high prices fetched by corn, debtors who could pay off long-standing debts in Assignats at their nominal value, and speculators, who sprang up on all sides to traffic in the fluctuations of the currency, made heavy profits and enriched themselves. But to the great majority of people the fall of the Assignats meant grave distress. The prices of bread, of meat, of fuel, of all the necessaries of life,rose as in a siege. One reads of the most fantastic payments, of thousands of francs paid for a dinner, a cab-fare or a load of wood. The sense of the value of money vanished, when its purchasing power declined every day. But it was only those who had plenty of it who possessed the power to purchase at all.
There is overwhelming evidence of the general distress in the winter of 1794-95. From all sides complaints came in of the exorbitant dearness of food, and that trouble was aggravated by the intense cold. In Paris and many great cities the authorities bought up food at ruinous prices and distributed it in meagre rations to the poor. But as the year advanced, these rations constantly diminished. The country districts bitterly complained that they were starved in order that the big towns might be fed. 'Many families, entire communes,' wrote an official from Laon, in the summer of 1795, 'have been without bread two or three months and are living on bran or herbs.' Around Caen the peasants were living on unripe peas, beans and green barley. In Picardy 'the great majority of people' overran the woods for food. From all sides the same reports poured in upon the Government. 'Yesterday,' wrote the authorities of Montreuil-sur-Mer, 'more than two hundred of our citizens set out to beg in the country;' and those who could not get food in other ways took it by force. Nor, in spite of the efforts of the authorities, were the large towns better off. Lyons, in January, was without bread 'for five full days.' At Troyes, in March, the public distribution of bread fell to two ounces a day. At Amiens, a few months later, it ceased altogether. At Nancy a traveller noticeda crowd of 'three thousand persons imploring in vain a few pounds of flour.' In Paris the police reported case after case of misery and starvation. 'Every day,' wrote a friend to Mallet du Pan, 'I see people of the poorer class dying of starvation in the streets.... Workmen generally have to work short time, owing to the weakness and exhaustion caused by want of food.'
It is no wonder if this acute distress resulted in an outbreak. Many of those who suffered the most had sympathised with the Jacobin party, and the arrest of the Terrorist leaders gave a certain political colour to the agitation which famine had produced. But in the main the insurrection which broke out on the 12th Germinal (1st April), which for a time threatened the safety of the Convention, and which joined to its demand for bread a demand for the Constitution of '93, was a spontaneous movement due to the pressure of starvation rather than to political intrigue. The leaders of the Mountain failed to turn it to account. The Jeunes Gens and the battalions of the Sections enabled the Government to win an easy victory, and the failure of the rising helped the reaction on. Motions were quickly passed for the transportation of Billaud-Varennes, Collot d'Herbois, Vadier and Barère, and for the arrest of Cambon, Thuriot, Amar, and other prominent members of the Mountain. Pichegru restored order in the streets. The Convention decreed the disarming of the Terrorists and the reorganisation of the National Guard. The officials of the Departments and of the Districts were restored to their old authority. The State, which had already undertaken to pay the debts of Emigrants whose possessions it hadconfiscated, now resolved to restore to the families of the victims the property of all persons who had been executed for political offences since the 10th March, 1793. A commission of eleven members was appointed to consider the bases of a new constitution. Early in May, Fouquier-Tinville and several of his associates in the old Tribunal were sent to the guillotine.
But the Jacobins were not yet silenced. The rapid progress of the reaction disquieted many. The reappearance of Emigrants and of non-juring priests, the extravagance of the Jeunes Gens, the revival of Royalist opinions in Paris, the terrible excesses which began to stain the reaction in the South-East of France, and which, under the direction of the 'Compagnies de Jésus' and the 'Compagnies du Sol,' had already made Lyons the scene of murder and of civil war, alarmed the Thermidorians and many other members of the Convention. The majority oscillated from day to day between their fear of the Mountain and their fear of a Royalist reaction, and displayed to all the world the vacillation and weakness of the ruling powers in France. At the beginning of May, the Jacobins so far prevailed as to carry a decree for the immediate arrest of returned Emigrants and refractory priests, and for the prosecution of Royalist publications. The disarming of Terrorists practically ceased. The high prices of food and the distress which they occasioned became more serious every day, and Jacobin agents laboured persistently to rouse the workmen to another insurrection. On the 1st Prairial (20th May), their efforts succeeded. A second rising, more formidable and better organised than thatof Germinal, confronted the Government, and the Convention, after a sharp struggle, only saved itself by yielding to the demands of the insurrectionary leaders. Fair promises, however, gained the Assembly time to bring up troops for its defence. On the evening of the 22nd May, a strong force of cavalry and infantry arrived in Paris. The next day, the Faubourg St. Antoine was besieged and compelled to surrender at discretion. Numerous arrests were made. The disarming of the Terrorists was completed. All pikes were seized. The reorganisation of the National Guard was accomplished, and the right of serving in it was once more restricted to members of the bourgeois class. A temporary military commission was established to try those accused of complicity in the insurrection, and the Revolutionary Tribunal was abolished. Six prominent deputies of the Mountain, including Goujon, Romme, Soubrany and Bourbotte, were sent to the scaffold. Lebon, long since put under arrest, Panis, almost forgotten, Lindet, Jean Bon St. André, Guffroy and Rühl, all except three of the members of the two redoubtable Committees, Pache, Bouchotte, and several of their associates in the former Ministry of War, shared in the proscription of their party. The influence of the extreme Jacobins was finally destroyed, and once again the policy of the reaction triumphed.
The decisive success of the moderate party was not without its effect upon European politics. At the time of the insurrection of Prairial, the French arms were completely victorious and many had begun to hope for the cessation of the war. The history of the revolutionary armies is the finest part of the French Revolution. Therethe spirit which the Revolution had inspired, and which had spent itself so fruitlessly in Paris, was seen at its best in the enthusiasm, the devotion and the gallantry of the troops. There too the high qualities of the Jacobin administrators appeared, their determined patriotism, their dauntless vigour and resource. There the Government which in Paris seemed to be only a Government of tyrants, revealed itself as a Government of heroes. There the politicians and intriguers of the Terror turned to the nobler work of national defence. Carnot and St. Just, Merlin of Thionville, Rewbell and Barras, Milhaud and Soubrany, Richard, Drouet, Cavaignac and Fabre d'Hérault are only some among the many brave men who, as Representatives on Mission with the armies, inspired the French troops with their own lofty courage, and both by precept and example taught them the impossibility of defeat. The enthusiasm which political intrigues had wasted found a deeper expression in the war, and the levelling freedom of the Republic threw open to all ranks alike the prospects of a great career. In the campaigns of 1793-94, Hoche, Pichegru and Jourdan had already reached the highest place, and Moreau and Kléber, Bernadotte, Ney, Davoût, Augereau and Victor, Soult, Masséna, Bonaparte were winning their way to notice and command. It is true that at the first the French levies were ill-organised and ill-disciplined, and that their earlier successes were due chiefly to the disunion or incapacity of their opponents. But the progress of the war and the vigorous measures of the Jacobin Government soon produced a remarkable change. There was no lack of material uponwhich to draw. To the old royal army there had in turn been added the battalions of national guards, the volunteers raised in 1792, thelevée en masseof the same year, which was, however, of very little use, the levy of 300,000 men formed, largely by conscription, in the spring of 1793, and the forces raised in the following summer by the imperious decrees of the Government, which claimed the services of all men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. On this material the Convention set to work, and the efforts of Dubois-Crancé and Carnot, seconded by their able advisers, and perfected by the strenuous action and wide powers of the great Committee, met with complete success. To Dubois-Crancé especially belongs the credit. It was he who, in the winter of 1793-94, at last carried through the Convention the great scheme for the reorganisation of the army which he had advocated so long, who committed the Government to the principle of conscription and to the amalgamation of the regulars with the volunteers, and who fused the two elements together by dividing the army into demi-brigades made up of one battalion of regulars and four of volunteers. The result of these measures appeared before long in the formation of a magnificent army, which for numbers, discipline and the spirit of its troops, was a match for the united forces of Europe.
The campaign of 1793, which at one time threatened France with serious danger, ended in complete success. The valuable victories of Houchard and of Jourdan on the North-Eastern frontier in September and October, drove the Allies back upon Belgium. The equally notablesuccesses of Hoche and Pichegru, which followed in Alsace, drove the victorious Austrians and Prussians again across the Rhine. The brave insurgents of La Vendée found themselves at last opposed by a powerful army under a general of high ability, and were defeated by Kléber at Chollet in October, and subsequently routed at Le Mans. By the end of the year France had ten armies for service in the field and an effective force of some six hundred thousand men. On the North-East, four armies, those of the Rhine, of the Moselle, of the Ardennes, and of the North, stretched from Strasbourg to the sea. Further to the South, the army of the Alps occupied Savoy, and the army of Italy, which had just reduced Toulon, waited for a new commander to launch it on an illustrious career. In the West, two more armies held the Pyrenees, and a third watched the insurgents of La Vendée; while on the Northern coast, the army of Normandy, not yet organised into a definite force, guarded the sea-board and dreamed vainly of invading England.
With these resources the Allies could not compete. But even had the troops been forthcoming, their disunion would have rendered victory impossible. In 1794, when France was preparing with the brightest prospects to reopen the campaign, the long-standing jealousy between Austria and Prussia reached its climax. Thugut, the Austrian minister, disliked his Prussian allies even more than his French enemies, and carrying to an extreme pitch the traditional selfishness of Austrian policy, intrigued on all sides for territorial aggrandisement, and meditated schemes for extending the Austriandominions in every quarter of Europe, in Flanders and Alsace, in Turkey and Poland, in Bavaria and Venice. In the North, Russia drew nearer every day to the completion of her long-prepared attack on Polish freedom, and Prussia, determined not to be left aside when her rivals shared the spoils of Poland, turned her attention and her energies towards the Vistula, when the sympathies of her king would gladly have turned towards the Rhine. In vain the English Government threw itself with fresh energy into the war, laboured to draw the coalition together, and promised generous supplies. In April, 1794, at the very moment when Malmesbury, the English envoy at the Hague, was pledging England, Holland and Prussia to renewed efforts in the war with France, the Polish revolt broke out at Warsaw, and Kosciusko's brave struggle for freedom diverted the attention of the Central Powers. It was evident that until the Polish question was settled, neither Prussia nor Austria would act with vigour against the French. Accordingly, the French armies on the North-Eastern frontier, now under the command of Pichegru and Jourdan, advanced against the divided Allies, defeated them at Turcoign and Fleurus, and entered Brussels on the 11th July. The conquest of Belgium and the invasion of Holland followed. While Suvórof stamped out the insurrection in Poland, and Austria and Russia drew up plans for the partition of that unhappy country, to which Prussia was afterwards compelled to accede, the French troops advanced into Holland, drove the Prince of Orange into flight and occupied the Hague and Amsterdam. At last Prussia, isolated and alarmed, consented toopen negotiations, and on the 5th April, she definitely separated herself from Austria, and made peace with France in the Treaty of Bâle.
There were many who hoped that the Treaty of Bâle might prove the beginning of a general peace, and so prepare the way for a Royalist restoration. The fresh disturbances among the peasants of La Vendée and their allies the Chouans of Brittany, which had been provoked in 1794 by the merciless policy of the Republic, by Turreau's 'Hellish Columns' and by Carrier's tyranny at Nantes, had been quieted, in the spring of 1795, by the conciliatory policy of the Republican generals, and the long struggle in the West seemed to be drawing to a close. In the Pyrenees the advance of the French brought the Spanish Government to terms, and a peace between France and Spain was concluded in July. In Paris the suppression of the insurrection of Prairial had raised very high the hopes of the Royalists. Many things seemed to point towards the restoration of the Constitution of '91, which at that time, as at an earlier date, would probably have satisfied the wishes of the majority of the nation. But events ordered otherwise. The high demands of the French Government, the vigour of English diplomacy, and the settlement of the Polish difficulty, which left the Emperor free to act, disappointed the expectations of a general peace. In the summer of 1795, England, Russia and Austria drew closer together and formed a fresh alliance for the prosecution of the war. Early in June, the unhappy little Dauphin died in prison, and his death dealt a heavy blow to the hopes of the Constitutional party. Many who would havewelcomed the son of Louis XVI as Constitutional King, could not reconcile themselves to the restoration of the Comte de Provence, the chief of the Emigrants in arms against France, the prince who, learning nothing from adversity, still condemned in the bitterest language all the changes which the Revolution had introduced, and still denounced as an enemy of the Bourbons every advocate of moderation or of liberal ideas. The French people had not made the Revolution in order to restore the Ancien Régime. The attempt of the Emigrants to renew the war in the West by an ill-timed descent upon Quiberon, although stamped out by Hoche in July, and punished with terrible severity by the Convention, revived the deep-seated hostility which all friends of the Revolution entertained towards the Emigrants. The fresh tidings which came in from the South of terrible excesses committed in the name of the reaction at Marseilles and Avignon, Tarascon and Aix, tended to check the flowing tide. The rapid advance of Royalist opinions in Paris, and the threatening demeanour of the Jeunes Gens and of the Sections at length alarmed the Thermidorians. The members of the Convention recalled to themselves that they were committed to the measures of the Revolution, and began to fear lest the march of events should carry them too far and involve them in a policy perilous to themselves.
Finally the Convention chose a middle course. The Constitution of 1795 retained the Republican form, and divided the supreme executive power among a Directory of five persons. The legislative power it committed to a Parliament consisting of two Houses, a Council of FiveHundred, who must be over thirty years of age, and a Council of Ancients, who must be over forty. The Parliament was to elect the Directory, but the functions of each were strictly defined; the legislative and the executive powers were kept jealously distinct, and cordial co-operation between them was rendered almost impossible. The Convention had learned from the experience of the past the necessity of making the Executive strong, but it had not yet learned the folly of making the legislature and the Executive independent rivals instead of harmonious allies. The new Parliament was to last for three years, but one-third of its members were renewable yearly. Apart from these new regulations, the Convention, rejecting a series of fantastic proposals brought forward by Sieyès, adhered to the main lines of the Constitution of 1791. The system of double election was re-established. The franchise was limited by a slight property qualification. In the local administration the division into Departments and Communes was retained. But the Communes were strictly subordinated to the Departments, the Districts were abolished altogether, and the numbers and powers of the officials were so reduced, as to simplify the whole system, and to increase the authority of the central Government. Other articles established freedom of worship, the freedom of labour, and the freedom of the Press, prohibited political clubs and federations, and forbade the return of the Emigrants to France.
But although the majority of the Convention yielded to the demand for the establishment of a settled Government, they had no wish to extinguish themselves. They knew that in the existing temper of the nation they hadlittle chance of being returned to power, and they feared the lengths to which the reaction might run. Accordingly, they proceeded to apply at once the principles laid down by the new constitution for the renewal of the legislative body, and by the decrees of the 5th and 13th Fructidor (22nd and 30th August), they declared that two-thirds of the new Councils must be composed of members of the Convention, and that only the remaining third should be chosen from new men at the General Election. These decrees, which were ratified by the primary assemblies and confirmed by the Convention in September, aroused general indignation in Paris. The numerous partisans of the reaction, already long impatient, and bitterly resenting the device by which the Convention proposed to continue its power in defiance of the sentiment of the nation, burst into premature revolt. The Lepelletier Section took the lead of the movement, called out the National Guards, and summoned the other Sections to rise against the tyranny of the Convention. On the 13th Vendémiaire (5th October) the insurrection broke out. The insurgent forces marched upon the Assembly, to find themselves confronted by the troops of Barras and by the artillery of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the triumph of the Government was assured.
With the futile insurrection of Vendémiaire the history of the Revolution ends. The failure of the rising in the Sections dealt a sharp blow to the hopes of the reaction. It determined the character of the new Directory. It installed in power a Government of men chosen exclusively from the advanced Republicans, neverin harmony with their own Parliament, out of sympathy with the great mass of the nation, relying on violence to maintain their authority, trusted by few and respected by none. The Directory rested on the army for support. It taught the troops what the Jacobins had never admitted, that they could dispose of the fortunes of the State, and when the occasion and the leader offered, the troops responded by choosing a ruler of their own. That ruler all parties welcomed with relief. He accepted at once the position of head of the nation, for he knew that the nation wanted rest. 'Now,' said the peasantry of France, as they recounted the stirring adventures of the past, 'now we are quiet, thanks to God and to Bonaparte.'
The lessons of the French Revolution it is for others than historians to point. Even at this distance we are perhaps hardly qualified to read them. With all its errors and its disappointments, it marks an epoch in the advance of men, for it assailed and uprooted for ever a system of privilege and social wrong, based on intellectual bondage and on the pitiless degradation of the poor. It destroyed that system not in France alone, but in many parts and principalities of Europe. It gained for Frenchmen some approach towards equality. It would have gained them freedom, had they known what freedom was. None can deny that the Revolution, at its outset, was welcomed in France with unsurpassed enthusiasm, and that as a whole it has been ratified by every generation of French people since. But in face of the evidence before us, it is no longer possible to doubt that the conduct of its later phases fell into the hands of a well-organised minority,who, although conspicuous in courage, were in character unworthy of the trust, whose methods Frenchmen never sanctioned, and whose crimes they never have condoned. No doubt, in that minority examples may be found of fine qualities and high desires, of firm if narrow principles, of pure enthusiasm for social reformation, of staunch devotion to the public service, of a love of country rarely matched. In summaries of history the exceptions are too often overlooked, and in classifying men together it is not easy to be just to all. It may be that some of the experiments of the Terror are even now destined to awaken the growing sympathy and interest of the world; and those experiments will not have been made in vain, if they bring home the inexorable maxim that no country can be regenerated by bad men, and that noble impulses are waste and fruitless without the reasoned sense of what is feasible and just, which nations honour and by which they live.