XV. 1794. 94. disastrous fallen, in consequence of the general uncertainty of the future, from £24,000,000 a-year to £17,000,000, and that at the very time when the embarrassment of the finances had been the principal cause of the convocation of the Successive States-General. No resource could be found to meet the steps of its pressing difficulties of the exchequer but the confiscation progress. of the property of the church, and subsequently of that of the emigrant nobles. These measures again engendered evils which tended to perpetuate the difficulties from which they sprang. The confiscation of the church property rendered necessary the laws against the refractory priests, and they, in their turn, produced the refusal of so many of the clergy to take the oaths to the Constitution, and thereby lighted the flames of civil war in la Vendée. At the same time, the severe enactments against the emigrant nobles produced a war of life and death with the aristocratic monarchs in Europe. Pressed by civil war within, and by the forces of Europe without, the Convention found themselves compelled to have recourse to the system of assignats, and carried on the enormous expenditure of a hundred and seventy millions sterling a-year, by dispensing with a prodigal hand the confiscated wealth of more than half of France. This prodigious issue of paper necessarily led to its rapid depreciation; all obligations of debt and credit were overturned by the necessity of accepting payment in a nominal currency; the rapid rise in the price of provisions compelled the government to adopt a maximum, and interfere with the arm of force in the management of public subsistence. Thence the forced requisitions, the compulsory sales, the distribution of rations, and all the innumerable tyrannical regulations which fettered industry in every department; and at length, by exciting the passions of the people against each other, brought down even to the humblest class the horrors which they had originally inflicted on their superiors. Such a survey of the consequences of human violence both vindicates the justice of Providence, by demonstrating XV. 1794. 95. CHAP. how rapidly and unavoidably the guilt of every class in society brings upon itself its own punishment, and tends to make us judge charitably of the conduct of men placed Manner in in such a terrible crisis of society. Harshly as we may think of the atrocities of the Revolution, let no man be is corrupted sure that, placed in similar circumstances, he would not revolution. have been betrayed into the same excesses. which the public mind during a It is the insensible gradation in violence, the experienced necessity of advancing with the tide, which renders such convulsions so perilous to the morals as well as the welfare of nations. The authors of many of the worst measures in the Revolution were restored to private life as innocent and inoffensive as other men; the most atrocious violations of right had been so long foreseen and discussed, that their occurrence produced little or no sensation. "Of all the lessons derived from the history of human passion," says Lavalette, "the most important is the utter impossibility which the best men will always experience of stopping, if they are once led into the path of error. If, a few years before they were perpetrated, the crimes of the Revolution could have been portrayed to those who afterwards committed them, even Robespierre himself would have recoiled with horror. Men are seduced, in the first instance, by plausible theories; their heated imaginations represent them as beneficial, and easy of execution; they advance unconsciously from errors to faults, and from faults to crimes, till sensibility is destroyed by the spectacle of guilt, and the most savage atrocities are dignified by the name of Lavalette, state policy."1 Such always will be the case; it is the i. 178. pressure of external circumstances which ultimately produces guilt, as much as guilt which at first induces the difficulties of public affairs. The leaders of a revolution are constantly advancing before the fire which they themselves have lighted; the moment they stop, they are consumed in the flames. One circumstance is manifest from the whole history of the Revolution, upon which it well becomes the people of CHAP. XV. 1794. 96. Inefficacy of juries as a volutionary this country to ponder, if they shall find themselves involved in a similar convulsion; that is, that by far the greatest and most atrocious crimes committed in its progress were perpetrated by jurymen. The whole victims of the revolutionary tribunal at Paris, 2800 in number, were check on rejudicially murdered by the verdicts of juries. The same crimes. was the case with almost all the other revolutionary tribunals in France. In England, all the atrocities of Jefferies, which had so powerful an effect in bringing about the Revolution of 1688, were effected by the same means. The monarchical cruelties which occasioned the English, the democratic atrocities which disgraced the French Revolution, found equally ready instruments in the passions or pliability of jurymen. This fact is not a little remarkable. It demonstrates how extremely fallacious is the reliance which is generally placed on the institution of jury-trial, as the bulwark of freedom and the shield of oppressed innocence. That it has often proved so in former times, when power was wielded by monarchs or aristocratic bodies, and juries were taken from the middle or lower classes, is certain. But what ensues when the lower orders themselves are the oppressors, and the sword of power is wielded by those whom they have placed in the seats of justice? Will they permit the accused aristocrats to be tried by their peers, as was the case with themselves when the nobles were in power? Unquestionably they will not; the first thing they invariably do is, to place the most violent of their own class and faction upon the lists of jurymen. Juries then become what Tocqueville says they are in America, nothing better than the judicial committee of the majority. Actuated by its passions, inflamed by its fears, envenomed by its jealousies, they are then more dangerous to real liberty, and perpetrate injustice on a greater scale, than permanent * "All the acts of Jefferies were done with the aid of juries, and without the censure of Parliament. They afford a fatal proof that judicial forms and constitutional establishments may be rendered unavailing by the subserviency or prejudice of those who are appointed to carry them into effect."-SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH'S Works, ii. 41. XV. 1794. In CHAP. judges ever could venture to do; for, in their case, numbers remove responsibility without lessening cruelty, and obscurity shelters crime without fostering virtue. democratic times, the deepest wounds to the cause of freedom will in general be inflicted by the hands of jurymen. Robespierre was to the internal march of the Revolution Both rose to carnation of eminence, and were sustained in power by surrendering the Revolu- themselves to the all-powerful current of public passion, nal govern- and directing it to the objects which the ambition of the 97. Robespierre what Napoleon was to its external passions. was the in tion in inter ment. great bulk of men at the time most ardently desired. Both owed the long continuance of their power to the opinion generally and deservedly entertained, that they were sincere in their enthusiasm, disinterested in their intentions, and invincible in their hearts. The dreadful catastrophes to which the rule of both led are to be regarded as the result, not so much of their individual actions, as of the false, and, in their ultimate consequences, terrible principles on which they proceeded. The maxim of Robespierre and St Just, that what constituted a republic was the destruction of every thing that opposed it, was precisely the principle which led Napoleon to his insatiable foreign conquests. Invincible necessity urged both on when they had launched on the career of crime; and that necessity was, the moral law of nature which dooms outrageous sin to punishment from the consequences of the very acts which itself most ardently desires. The 9th Thermidor was the counterpart of the Moscow retreat. Instead, then, of regarding Robespierre as a mere individual man, and ascribing the horrors of his career to his wicked propensities, it is more consonant to historic justice, as well as the cause of virtue, to represent him as the INCARNATION IN CIVIL GOVERNMENT OF THE REVOLUTION. And probably no Avatar sent on such a mission could be imbued with fewer vices. Extravagant as the opinions of Robespierre now appear, and dreadful as were the consequences to which they led, XV. 1794. 98. tal errors pierre's principles. there seems no reason to doubt that they were seriously CHAP. "Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis; at ille Instead of this, he found, to his unspeakable horror, that It is altogether a mistake, therefore, to represent the * "The rustic waits till the stream flows out; but it VOL. III. HORACE. 2 A |