the principle which led Napoleon to | Instead of this, he found, to his unhis insatiable foreign conquests. In-speakable horror, that the Republican vincible necessity urged both on when authorities, whom his principles had they had launched on the career of created, were infinitely more corrupt crime; and that necessity was, the moral and oppressive than the aristocratic or law of nature which dooms outrageous monarchical had been. He adventured sin to punishment from the conse- on the attempt to destroy the unparalquences of the very acts which itself leled mass of iniquity which had risen most ardently desires. The 9th Ther- to the direction of affairs under his midor was the counterpart of the Mos- own system of universal suffrage, and cow retreat. Instead, then, of regard- was crushed by its weight. Robesing Robespierre as a mere individual pierre's career was thus not the offspring man, and ascribing the horrors of his of any individual character; it was the career to his wicked propensities, it is result of the delusion of the age, and more consonant to historic justice, as affords a reductio ad absurdum of its well as the cause of virtue, to represent errors. And that delusion was the him as the INCARNATION IN CIVIL GOV- belief of the natural innocence of man; ERNMENT OF THE REVOLUTION. And pro- those errors, that it was lawful to do bably no Avatar sent on such a mission evil that good might come of it. could be imbued with fewer vices. 98. Extravagant as the opinions of Robespierre now appear, and dreadful as were the consequences to which they led, there seems no reason to doubt that they were seriously entertained by him, and that, throughout his bloody career, he was actuated in the main by the desire of promoting, in the end, human felicity. Individual ambition, jealousy of rivals, envy of superiors, may have co-operated in prompting his actions; but as his language was uniformly philanthropic, so his private disinterestedness never betrayed the influence of corrupt or mercenary motives. It was the total disregard of the means employed, the fatal error of supposing that the great body of mankind are innocent, and that the prevailing evils of society were all owing to the vices of a few, that was the cause of all the unspeakable misery he brought upon mankind. He was a stern and relentless fanatic of the school of Rousseau. He constantly hoped that, when he had destroyed the whole superior classes of society, general virtue would rise up on the foundation of restored equality; he always expected to see the stream of human iniquity run out : "Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis; at ille Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ævum."* 99. It is altogether a mistake, therefore, to represent the atrocities of the Revolution as the work merely of the guilty men who were at its head. It is evident, from every page of its annals, that these men rose to eminence only because they were the representatives of its spirit, and resolutely determined to do its work. Equally with Napoleon during his career of foreign conquest, Robespierre always marched with the opinions of five millions of men. It was the force of guilty passion, the thirst for illicit gratification, the passion for general destruction, which raised up his army of satellites, in the first case, as it was the desire of plunder, the thirst for elevation, the passion for glory, in the last. Robespierre had no private fortune, and made none in the Revolution; he died as poor as he lived. What, then, was the secret of his astonishing power? Nothing but the uniform and ardent support of the people, who justly regarded him as thoroughly identified with their supposed interests, and heart and soul actuated by their real passions. The Jacobin Club composed his janissaries, the revolutionary committees his regular forces. But these janissaries and these forces were themselves unarmed; their influence was entirely a moral one: they governed the armed force of the national guard, because they partook of its passions, and were identified with its objects. The whole standing army of France was congre gated on the frontier during the Reign of Terror; fifteen hundred thousand national guards were in arms in the interior; when a few battalions of them at Paris spoke out, the tyranny was at end. Three thousand men in the Place de Grève overthrew and made prisoner the tyrant. The crimes of the Revolution, therefore, were not the exclusive deeds of any particular body of men; they were the work of the masses, and the guilt of them must be borne by the immense majority of the French nation. Their real cause is to be found in the overthrow of religion which Voltaire effected, the dreams of equality which Rousseau introduced. 100. There is no character, however, which has not some redeeming points; pure unmixed wickedness is the creation of romance, but never yet appeared in real life.* Even the Jacobins of Paris were not destitute of good qualities; history would deviate equally from its first duty, and its chief usefulness, if it did not bring them prominently forward. With the exception of some atrocious men, such as Collot d'Herbois, Fouché, Carrier, and a few others, who were villains as base as they were inhuman, almost entirely guided by selfish motives, they were, for the most part, possessed of some qualities in which the seeds of a noble character are to be found. In moral courage, energy of mind, and decision of conduct, they yielded to none in ancient or modern times: their heroic resolution to maintain, amidst unexampled perils, the independence of their coun *At the trial of Burke in Edinburgh, on December 24, 1828, a remarkable instance of this occurred. He was indicted for three cold-blooded murders, perpetrated on unsuspecting victims, whom he lured into his den, to sell their bodies. Subsequently it was ascertained he had murdered sixteen in this way. Yet this monster, who was tried along with a young woman, his associate, with whom he lived, no sooner heard the verdict of the jury, which found him guilty and acquitted her, than he threw his arms around her neck and kissed her, saying, "Thank God! Helen, you are saved." It occurred to the author at the moment, who conducted the prosecution on the part of the Crown-— "How many are there among his judges, jury, or accusers, who, in similar circumstances, would have done the same?" try, was worthy of the best days of Roman patriotism. They possessed in the highest degree the quality so finely described by the poet : "The unconquerable will And study of revenge, immortal hate, With courage never to submit or yield, And what is else not to be overcome." If this strenuous will could be separated from the obvious necessity of repelling the Allies, to avoid punishment for the numberless crimes which they had committed, it would be deserving of the highest admiration mingled, as it necessarily was in their case, with a large portion of that baser alloy, it is still a redeeming point in their character. Some of them, doubtless, were selfish or rapacious, and used their power for the purposes of individual lust or private emolument. But others, among whom we must number Robespierre and St Just, were entirely free from this degrading contamination, and, in the atrocities they committed, were governed, if not by public principle, at least by private ambition. Even the blood which they shed was often the result, in their estimation, not so much of terror or danger, as of overbearing necessity. They deemed it essential to the success of freedom; and regarded the victims, who perished under the guillotine, as the melancholy sacrifice which required to be laid on its altar. 101. In arriving at this frightful conclusion, they were, doubtless, mainly influenced by the perils of their own situation. They massacred others because they were conscious that death, were they vanquished, justly awaited themselves. But still the weakness of humanity in their, as in many similar cases, deluded them by the magic of words, or the supposed influence of purer motives, and led them to commit the greatest crimes, while constantly professing, and often feeling, the noblest intentions. There is nothing surprising or incredible in this: we have only to recollect, that all France joined in a crusade against the Albigeois, and that its bravest warriors deemed themselves thousands of wretches to temporal secure from eternal, by consigning flames; we have only to go back, in ima gination, to Godfrey of Bouillon and the Christian warriors putting forty thousand unresisting citizens to death on the storming of Jerusalem, and wading to the Holy Sepulchre ankle-deep in human gore-to be convinced that such delusions are not peculiar to any particular age or country, but that they are the universal offspring of fanaticism, whether in political or religious contests. The writers who represent the Jacobins as mere bloodthirsty wretches, vultures insatiate in their passion for destruction, are well-meaning and amiable, but weak and ignorant men, unacquainted with the real working of delusion or wickedness in the human heart, and calculated to mislead, rather than direct, future ages on the approach of times similar to that in which these obtain the ascendancy. Vice never appears in such colours: it invariably conceals its real deformity. It is by borrowing the language and assuming the garb of virtue, that its greatest triumphs are gained. It is the "deceit fulness of sin' which constitutes its greatest danger; its worst excesses ever attest the truth of Rochefoucault's maxim, that "hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue." If other states are ever to be ruled by a Jacobin faction, the advent of their power will not be marked by sanguinary professions, or the hideous display of heartless atrocity. It will be ushered in by the warmest expressions of philanthropy, by boundless hopes of felicity, and professions of the utmost regard for The ablest and most interesting apology for the Jacobins is to be found in the Memoirs of Levasseur de la Sarthe, himself no inconsiderable actor in their sanguinary deeds. It is highly satisfactory to have such a work to do justice to their intentions; and it is a favourable symptom of the love of impartiality in the human heart, that even Robespierre and St Just have had their defenders. Whatever opinions may be entertained on this point, one thing seems very clear, that Robespierre's abilities were of the highest order, and that the contrary opinions expressed by so many of his contemporaries were suggested by envy or horror. It is impossible in any other way to account for his long dominion over France, at a period when talent of every sort was hurled forth in wild confusion to the great central arena at Paris. His speeches are a sufficient indication of the the great principles of public justice and general happiness.* 102. There is no opinion more frequently stated by the annalists and historians of the Revolution on the popu lar side in France, than that the march of the Revolution was inevitable; that an invincible fatality attends all such convulsions; and that by no human exertions could its progress have been changed, or its horrors averted. The able works of Thiers, Mignet, and many others, are mainly directed to this end; and it constitutes, in their estimation, the best apology for the Revolution. Never was an opinion more erroneous. There is nothing in the annals of human affairs which warrants the conclusion, that improvement necessarily leads to revolution; and that in revolution a succession of rulers, each more sanguinary and atrocious than the preceding, must be endured before the order of society is restored. It is not the career of reform, it is the career of guilt, which leads to these consequences: this deplorable succession took place in France, not because changes were made, but because boundless crimes in the course of these changes were committed. The partisans of liberal institutions have fallen into a capital error, when, in their anxiety to exculpate the actors in the Revolution, they have laid its horrors on the cause of the Revolution itself: to do so, was to brand the cause of freedom with infamy, when that infamy should have been confined to its wicked supporters. It was the early commission vigour of his mind; they are distinguished in many instances by a nervous eloquence, a fearless energy, a simple and manly cast of thought, very different from most of the frothy declamations at the tribune. This doctrine is the one put by Corneille into the month of Theseus:"L'âme est donc tout esclave: une loi souveraine Vers le bien ou le mal incessamment l'entraîne; Et nous ne recevons ni crainte ni désir Edipe, Act iii. scene 6. of crime by the leaders of the move-guinary fanaticism; that of Danton and ment which precipitated and rendered his confederates, of stoical infidelity; irretrievable its subsequent scenes; the that of Madame Roland and the Gironcareer of passion in nations is precisely dists, of reckless ambition and deluded similar to its excesses in individuals, virtue; that of Louis and his family, of and subject to the same moral laws. If religious forgiveness. The moralist will we would seek the key to the frightful contrast the different effects of virtue aberrations of the Revolution, we have and wickedness in the last moments of only to turn to the exposition, by the life; the Christian will mark with thankgreat English divines, of the progress of fulness the superiority, in the supreme guilty passions in the individual. The hour, to the sublimest efforts of human description of the one might pass for a virtue, which was evinced by the befaithful portrait of the other. There lievers in his own faith. It is this suis a necessity to which both are sub-periority which provides a remedy for jected; but it is not a blind fatality, or the injustice which has occasioned it. a necessary connection between change Posterity invariably declares for the and convulsion. It is the moral law of cause of virtue; for it has ceased to nature, that vice, whether in nations or have any interest to support that of vice. private men, when the proffered oppor- The march of democracy, though not tunities of repentance have been ne- prevented by the wisdom of man, is glected, is made to work out its deserved speedily stopped by the laws of nature. punishment in the efforts which it makes The people in the end learn from their for its own gratification. own suffering, if they will not from the experience of others, that the gift of unbounded political power is fatal to those Their sinful state, and to appease betimes who receive it; that despotism may oriTh' incensed Deity, while offer'd grace Invites: for I will clear their senses dark ginate in the workshop of the artisan What may suffice, and soften stony hearts as well as in the palace of the sovereign; To pray, repent, and bring obedience due. and that those who, yielding to the This my long sufferance and day of grace, They who neglect and scorn, shall never taste, wiles of the tempter, eat of the forbidBut hard be harden'd, blind be blinded more, den fruit, must be driven from the joys That they may stumble on, and deeper fall; of Paradise, to wander amid the sufferAnd none but such from mercy I exclude."ting of a guilty world. Genius, long a 103. The death of Hébert and the Anarchists was that of guilty depravity; that of Robespierre and St Just of san "For they shall hear me call, and oft be warn'd * Take, for example, the following passage from Archbishop Tillotson: "All vice stands upon a precipice; to engage in any sinful course is to run down the hill. If we once let loose the propensities of our nature, we cannot gather in the reins and govern them as we please; it is much easier not to begin a bad course, than to stop it when begun. 'Tis a good thing for a man to think to set bounds to himself in anything that is bad; to resolve to sin in number, weight, and measure, with great temperance and discretion; that he will commit this sin, and then give over; to entertain but this one temptation, and after that shut the door, and admit no more. Our corrupt hearts, when they are once set in motion, are like the raging sea, to which we can set no bounds, nor say to it, Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further. Sin is very cunning and deceitful, and does strangely gain upon men when once they give way to it. It is of a very bewitching nature, and hath strange arts of address and insinuation. The giving way to a small sin does marvellous stranger to the cause of order, resumes her place by its side; she gives to a suffering, what she refused to a ruling ly prepare and dispose a man for a greater. By giving way to one little vice after another, the strongest resolution may be broken. 'Tis scarce imaginable of what force a single bad action is to produce more: for sin is very teeming and fruitful; and though there be no blessing annexed to it, yet it does strangely increase and multiply. As there is a connexion of one virtue with another, so vices are linked together, and one sin draws many after it. When the devil tempts a man to commit any wickedness, he does, as it were, lay a long train of sins; and if the first temptation take, they give fire to another. Let us then resist the beginning of sin! because we have then most power, and sin least."-TILLOTSON, Serm. x. Works, i. 91, fol. ed.--This might stand for a graphic picture of the downward progress of the revolutionary passion in nations; philosophy will strive in vain to give so clear an elucidation of the causes which render it, when once thoroughly awakened, so destructive in its career. † Paradise Lost, iii. 185. power. The indignation of virtue, the tion to those which are to succeed it. satire of talent, is wreaked on the pan- Whatever may be the temporary ascenderers to popular gratification; the sy-dancy of violence or anarchy, there can cophancy of journals, the baseness of be but one opinion as to the final tenWe can the press, the tyranny of the mob, em- dency of the laws of nature. ploy the pencil of the Tacitus who por- discern the rainbow of peace, though trays the decline and fall of such con- not ourselves destined to reach the ark vulsions. It is this reaction of Genius of salvation; and look forward with against Violence, of Virtue against Vice, confidence to the future improvement which steadies the march of human of the species, from amidst the storm events, and renders the miseries of one which is to subvert the monarchies of age the source of elevation and instruc- Europe. CHAPTER XVI. CAMPAIGN OF 1794. 1. "THE war," says Jomini, "so rash- | evanescent passions into a lasting form. ly provoked by the declamations of the Girondists, was hardly commenced in good earnest, when it became evident that all the established relations and balance of power in Europe were to be dissolved in the struggle. France and England had not yet joined in mortal conflict, and yet it was easy to foresee that the one was destined to become irresistible at land, and the other to acquire the dominion of the seas.' It was not the mere energy of the Revolution, nor the closing of all other avenues of employment, which produced the fearful military power of France. These causes, while they alone were in operation, proved totally insufficient to withstand the shock of the disciplined armies of Germany. It was the subsequent despotism of the Committee of Public Salvation which consolidated the otherwise discordant materials of the Revolution, by superinducing the terror of authority on the fervour of freedom. The mere strength of enthusiastic feeling, even when exerted in the noblest of causes-that of national defence can never produce those steady and persevering efforts which are requisite for durable success. It is power and force which can alone mould the Liberty without discipline would have perished in licentiousness; discipline without spirit would have proved inadequate to the struggle. It was the combination of the two which became so fatal to the European monarchies, and, by turning all the energies of France into one regulated channel, converted the Reign of Terror into the School of Conquest. 2. But while these changes were in progress on the Continent of Europe, a very different fate awaited the naval armaments of France. Power at sea, unlike victory at land, cannot spring from mere suffering, or from the energy of destitute warriors turned out with arms in their hands to plunder and oppress mankind. Fleets require nautical skill, commercial wealth, and extensive credit. Centuries of pacific exertion, habits acquired during many successive generations, are essential to greatness on that element. The general meets with resources of all kinds in the countries into which he turns his troops; the admiral finds nothing to support him in the sterile waste of the ocean: and before he can even put to sea and brave the fury of the waves, he must have laid in extensive stores, and con |