partisan rivalry, the machinations of intrigue and malevolence. For eight days, now, it has been given out that those members of the National Assembly in favor of the provision requiring the concurrence of the royal will for the exercise of the right of peace and war are parricides of the public liberty. Rumors of perfidy, of corruption, have been bruited. Popular vengeance has been invoked to enforce the tyranny of opinion; and denunciations have been uttered, as if, on a subject involving one of the most delicate and difficult questions affecting the organization of society, persons could not dissent without a crime. What strange madness, what deplorable infatuation, is this, which thus incites against one another men whom―let debate run never so high one common object, one indestructible sentiment of patriotism, ought always to bring together, always to reünite; but who thus substitute, alas! the irascibility of self-love for devotion to the public good, and give one another over, without compunction, to the hatred and distrust of the People!

And me, too · me, but the other day, they would have borne in triumph; and now they cry in the streets, THE GREAT TREASON OF THE COUNT OF MIRABEAU! I needed not this lesson to teach me, how short the distance from the Capitol to the Tarpeian Rock! But the man who battles for reason, for country, does not so easily admit that he is vanquished. He who has the consciousness that he deserves well of that country, and, above all, that he is still able to serve her; who disdains a vain celebrity, and prizes veritable glory above the successes of the day; who would speak the truth, and labor for the public weal, independently of the fluctuations of popular opinion, such a man carries in his own breast the recompense of his services, the solace of his pains, the reward of his dangers. The harvest he looks for the destiny, the only destiny, to which he aspires is that of his good name; and for that he is content to trust to to time, that incorruptible judge, who dispenses justice to all! Let those who, for these eight days past, have been ignorantly predicting my opinion, who, at this moment, calumniate my discourse without comprehending it, let them charge me, if they will, with beginning to offer incense to the impotent idols I have overturnedwith being the vile stipendiary of men whom I have never ceased to combat; let them denounce as an enemy of the Revolution him, who at least has contributed so much to its cause, that his safety, if not his glory, lies in its support; let them deliver over to the rage of a deceived People him, who, for twenty years, has warred against oppression in all its forms; who spoke to Frenchmen of Liberty, of a Constitution, of Resistance, at a time when his vile calumniators were sucking the milk of Courts, living on those dominant abuses which he denounced: — what matters it? These underhand attacks

time,

shall not stop me in my career. I will say to my traducers, Answer if you can, and then calumniate to your heart's content! And now I reënter the lists, armed only with my principles, and a steadfast conscience.

17. EULOGIUM ON FRANKLIN, JUNE 11, 1790.-Mirabeau. Original Translation.

FRANKLIN is dead! Restored to the bosom of the Divinity is that genius which gave freedom to America, and rayed forth torrents of light upon Europe. The sage whom two worlds claim - the man whom the History of Empires and the History of Science alike contend for-occupied, it cannot be denied, a lofty rank among his species. Long enough have political Cabinets signalized the death of those who were great in their funeral eulogies only. Long enough has the etiquette of Courts prescribed hypocritical mournings. For their benefactors only, should Nations assume the emblems of grief; and the Representatives of Nations should commend only the heroes of humanity to public veneration.

In the fourteen States of the Confederacy, Congress has ordained a mourning of two months for the death of Franklin; and America is at this moment acquitting herself of this tribute of honor to one of the Fathers of her Constitution. Would it not become us, Gentlemen, to unite in this religious act; to participate in this homage, publicly rendered, at once to the rights of man, and to the philosopher who has contributed most largely to their vindication throughout the world? Antiquity would have erected altars to this great and powerful genius, who, to promote the welfare of mankind, comprehending both the Heavens and the Earth in the range of his thought, could at once snatch the bolt from the cloud and the sceptre from tyrants. France, enlightened and free, owes at least the acknowledgment of her remembrance and regret to one of the greatest intellects that ever served the united cause of philosophy and liberty. I propose that it be now decreed that the National Assembly wear mourning, during three days, for Benjamin Franklin.

18. THE UNION OF CHURCH AND STATE. — Original Translation from Mirabeau.

WE are reproached with having refused to decree that the Catholic religion, Apostolic and Roman, is the national religion. To declare the Christian religion national, would be to dishonor it in its most intimate and essential characteristic. In general terms, it may be said, that religion is not, and cannot be, a relation between the individual man and society. It is a relation between him and the Infinite Being. Would you understand what was meant by a national conscience? Religion is no more national than conscience! A man is not veritably religious in so far as he is attached to the religion of a Nation. If there were but one religion in the world, and all men were agreed in professing it, it would be none the less true that each would have the sincere sentiment of religion so far only as he should be himself religious with a religion of his own; that is to say, so far only as he would be wedded to that universal religion, even though the whole human race were to abjure it. And so, from whatever point we consider religion, to term it national is to give it a designation insignificant or absurd.

Would it be as the arbiter of its truth, or as the judge of its aptitude to form good citizens, that the Legislature would make a religion constitutional? But, in the first place, are there national truths? In the second place, can it be ever useful to the public happiness to fetter the conscience of men by a law of the State? The law unites us only in those points where adhesion is essential to social organization. Those points belong only to the superficies of our being. In thought and conscience men remain isolated; and their association leaves to them, in these respects, the absolute freedom of the state of nature.

What a spectacle would it be for those early Christians, who, to escape the sword of Persecution, were obliged to consecrate their altars in caves or amid ruins, what a spectacle would it be for them, could they this day come among us, and witness the glory with which their despised religion now sees itself environed; the temples, the lofty steeples bearing aloft the glittering emblem of their faith; the evangelic cross, which crowns the summit of all the departments of this great Empire! What a transporting sight for those who, in descending to the tomb, had seen that religion, during their lives, honored only in the lurking-places of the forest and the desert! Methinks I hear them exclaim, even as that stranger of the old time exclaimed, on beholding the encampment of the People of God,"HOW GOODLY ARE THY TENTS, O JACOB, AND THY TABERNACLES, O ISRAEL!" Calm, then, ah! calm your apprehensions, ye ministers of the God of peace and truth! Blush rather at your incendiary exaggerations, and no longer look at the action of this Assembly through the medium of your passions. We do not ask it of you to take an oath contrary to the law of your heart; but we do ask it of you, in the name of that God who will judge us all, not to confound human opinions and scholastic traditions with the sacred and inviolable rules of the Gospel. If it be contrary to morality to act against one's conscience, it is none the less so to form one's conscience after false and arbitrary principles. The obligation to form and enlighten one's conscience is anterior to the obligation to follow one's conscience. The greatest public calamities have been caused by men who believed they were obeying God, and saving their own souls.

19. TO THE FRENCH PEOPLE, 1792.- Original Translation from Vergniaud. Vergniaud, the most eloquent orator of the celebrated party known as the Girondists, during the French Revolution, was born at Limoges, in 1759. He was executed in 1793. As an orator, his renown is second only to that of Mirabeau, in France. His speeches were always carefully prepared beforehand.

PREPARATIONS for war are manifest on our frontiers; and we hear of renewed plots against liberty. Our armies reassemble; mighty movements agitate the Empire. Martial law having become necessary, it has seemed to us just. But we have succeeded only in brandishing for a moment the thunderbolt in the eyes of rebellion. The sanction of the King has been refused to our decrees. The princes

of Germany make their territory a retreat for the conspirators against you. They favor the plots of the emigrants. They furnish them an asylum-they furnish them gold, arms, horses, and munitions. Is not the patience suicidal which tolerates all this? Doubtless you have renounced all projects of conquest; but you have not promised to endure such insolent provocations. You have shaken off the yoke of your tyrants; but it was not to bend the knee to foreign despots.

But, beware! You are environed by snares. They seek to drive you, by disgust or lassitude, to a state of languor fatal to your courage, or fatal to its right direction. They seek to separate you from us; they pursue a system of calumny against the National Assembly; they incriminate your Revolution in your eyes. 0! beware of these attempts at panic! Repel, indignantly, these impostors, who, while they affect a hypocritical zeal for the Constitution, cease not to urge upon you the monarchy! The monarchy! With them it is the counter-revolution! The monarchy? It is the nobility! The counter-revolution what is it but taxation, feudality, the Bastille, chains and executioners, to punish the sublime aspirations of liberty? What is it but foreign satellites in the midst of the State? What, but bankruptcy, engulfing, with your assignats, your private fortunes and the national wealth; what, but the furies of fanaticism and of vengeance, assassinations, pillage, and incendiarism, in short, despotism and death, disputing, over rivers of blood and heaps of carcasses, the dominion of your wretched country? The nobility! That is to say, two classes of men; the one for grandeur, the other for debasement!-the one for tyranny, the other for servitude! The nobility! Ah! the very word is an insult to the human race!

And yet, it is in order to secure the success of these conspiracies that Europe is now put in motion against you! Be it so! By a solemn declaration must these guilty hopes be crushed. Yes, the free representatives of France, unshaken in their attachment to the Constitution, will be buried beneath its ruins, before they consent to a capitulation at once unworthy of them and of you. Rally! Be reassured! They would raise the Nations against you:- they will raise only princes. The heart of every People is with you. It is their cause which you embrace, in defending your own. Ever abhorred be war! It is the greatest of the crimes of men ; - it is the most terrible scourge of humanity! But, since you are irresistibly forced to it, yield to the course of your destinies. Who can foresee where will end the punishment of the tyrants who will have driven you to take up arms?

20. AGAINST THE TERRORISM OF THE JACOBINS, 1792.-Id. Orig. Trans.

THE blinded Parisians presume to call themselves free. Alas! it is true they are no longer the slaves of crowned tyrants; but they are the slaves of men the most vile, and of wretches the most detestable;

men who continue to imagine that the Revolution has been made for themselves alone, and who have sent Louis XVI. to the Temple, in order that they may be enthroned at the Tuileries! * It is time to break these disgraceful chains — to crush this new despotism. It is time that those who have made honest men tremble should be made to tremble in their turn. I am not ignorant that they have poniards at their service. On the night of the second of September — that night of proscription!-did they not seek to turn them against several deputies, and myself among the number? Were we not denounced to the People as traitors? Fortunately, it was the People into whose hands we fell. The assassins were elsewhere occupied. The voice of calumny failed of its effect. If my voice may yet make itself heard from this place, I call you all to witness, it shall not cease to thunder, with all its energy, against tyrants, whether of high or low degree. What to me their ruffians and their poniards? What his own life to the representative of the People, while the safety of the country is at stake?

When William Tell adjusted the arrow which was to pierce the fatal apple that a tyrant had placed on his son's head, he exclaimed, "Perish my name, and perish my memory, provided Switzerland may be free!" And we, also, - we will say, "Perish the National Assembly and its memory, provided France may be free!"† Ay, perish the National Assembly and its memory, so by its death it may save the Nation from a course of crime that would affix an eternal stigma to the French name; so, by its action, it may show the Nations of Europe that, despite the calumnies by which it is sought to dishonor France, there is still in the very bosom of that momentary anarchy where the brigands have plunged us - there is still in our country some public virtue, some respect for humanity left! Perish the National Assembly and its memory, if upon our ashes our more fortunate successors may establish the edifice of a Constitution, which shall assure the happiness of France, and consolidate the reign of liberty and equality!

21. AGAINST WAR, JAN. 13, 1792.-Robespierre. Original Translation. SHALL we await the orders of the War Office to overturn Thrones? Shall we await the signal of the Court? In this war against aristocrats and Kings, shall we look to be commanded by these same Patricians, these eternal favorites of Despotism? No! Alone let us

*Pronounced Tweelree.

The deputies here rose, as by an unanimous impulse, and repeated, with enthusiasm, the oath of Vergniaud. The audience, who occupied the galleries, also mingled their voices with those of the deputies. To appreciate fully the intrepid eloquence of this speech, it should be remembered that France was, at that moment, virtually under the sanguinary dictatorship of the Jacobin Club; and that their proscriptions and massacres threatened to involve all who did not acquiesce in their measures. Vergniaud soon afterward paid the penalty of his courage; and justified his bold words by a bold death on the scaffold.