after batch of the revolutionary leaders were thrown in without truce or mercy. Blood still called unto blood, and victims entailed ever fresh victims by the inextricable mesh of circumstance.
All the offspring of the Revolution, the noble and ignoble, the fairest and foulest, followed in turn. The anarchic Hébertists, who had grown bloated on the blood-money of the condemned, were succeeded by Camille Desmoulins and the titanic Danton; revolters now revolted against the terror, and clamouring for a Committee of Mercy. These clamours were silenced by the guillotine; but their overthrow shook the foundation of the Republic. Still there stood its strongest pillar, the inexorable Robespierre! What ultimate plans of government he nourished we shall never know. Cut off in the middle of his career, this man—who as a young judge had resigned his post from remorse at having condemned a murderer to death, and who not many years afterwards devised the Law of Prairial, the deadly instrument of the Terror by which one thousand three hundred and fifty-six victims perished from March to July 1794—must now always remain one of the enigmas of history. If, as is assumed, he was fain to kill the Terror by the Terror, to fill up the abyss by dead bodies, and so cross over this bridge of corpses into the promised land of a reorganized society, his plan was the most horrible failure. And it is well that it was so. Better that the Republic perished than that it should flourish on such a basis. Robespierre himself fell into the abyss, hurled by the Revolution whose riddle he had failed to solve, and after him came the great Revolution herself.
But though the Republic perished, the conquests of
