BABEUF'S CONSPIRACY.
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hearts were pure, and whose consciences were not perverted, became necessarily interested in the complete triumph of the Order of Equality. But amongst the partisans of the system based on egoism,False friends of Equality. there were, besides those whom old prejudices attached to it, many that aspired to preserve, and others that wished to conquer for themselves, exclusive enjoyments and pre-eminence. This latter party, devoid of all virtue, affected a love of equality, and even an affection towards its sincere friends, so long as they fancied they would be able to prevent its establishment, and to turn to their own profit the general fermentation they had themselves provoked.
Efforts and progress of the party of Equality. Since the commencement of the Revolution, the friends of equality, that is to say, of justice, exerted themselves to prepare a triumph for it, by opposing in the distance, the views of the parties that were its enemies. Under the Constituent Assembly, they combatted against the unjust distinction of citizens into active and inactive—against the contribution of a mark of silver being required as a condition of eligibility to the national representation—against the royal veto, and against martial law. They thundered, at one and the Same time, against the avowed Royalists, and against those who hypocritically covered themselves with the varnish of patriotism, they proposed the progressive impost—opposed the reinstatement of the King after his forced return from Varennes—sustained the courage of the patriots, when it was at the point of being extinguished after the massacre of the Champ de Mars—unmasked the aristocratic complots of those who prematurely demanded the Republic. These, and a variety of other services, they rendered under the Constituent. Under the first Legislative Assembly they denounced the dismissal of the military patriots, exposed to light the snare hidden under the declaration of war against Austria, caused crowns of honour to be decreed to the Swiss soldiers of the Château-Vieux, unmasked the dissimula-