century, and had consequently flung themselves into the movement with an emotional impulse that had gone far to accelerate it, the women of the people, except in Paris and some other large centres, where hunger spurred them into insurrection, were wedded to their Church. Here, in fact, lay the real, insuperable difficulty, and the fierce animosities of a semi-religious warfare began to envenom the deadly strife.
The responsibility of the decrees against the emigrants and non-juring priests rests mainly with the Girondins. Their next decisive step was to preach war; not a prudent, self-defensive war, but war on a grander scale than the world had yet known, a crusade for Liberty throughout Europe. And Vergniaud, that storm-bird of the Revolution, who continually rose above the rage of temporal contests to some serene ether of thought, lifted up all hearts in the Assembly as he cried in that richly cadenced voice of his: "A thought rises within me. The shades of the generations of the past seem to come crowding to this your temple, and to conjure you, in the name of the evils they endured from slavery, to deliver from them the unborn generations whose fate is in your hands. Grant this prayer: be the Providence of the future: enter into a covenant with that eternal justice now protecting us."
These solemn words converted the Chamber into a temple. But, unanimous as was the cry for war, one man held out against it, the inflexible Robespierre, who urged, with statesman-like sagacity, that the nation should get rid of its internal foes before attacking the foreigner. The first decisive difference in opinion between him and Brissot broke out on this occasion, for the latter, reposing infinite faith in the new doctrine, was less distrustful of the coadjutors
