The First French Republic 459 even that statue, forty-six feet high, which David proposes to make ? If by liberty you do not understand, as I do, great principles, but only a bit of stone, there never was idolatry more stupid and expensive than ours. Oh, my dear fellow-citizens, have we sunk so low as to prostrate ourselves before such divinities ? No, heaven-born liberty is no nymph of the opera, nor a red liberty cap, nor a dirty shirt and rags. Liberty is happiness, reason, equality, justice, the Declara- tion of Rights, your sublime constitution. Would you have me recognize this liberty, have me fall at her feet, and shed all my blood for her ? Then open the prison doors to the two hundred thousand citizens whom you call suspects, for in the Declaration of Rights no prisons for suspicion are provided for, only places of detention. Suspicion has no prison, but only the public accuser ; there are no suspects, but only those accused of offenses estab- lished by law. Do not think that such a measure would be fatal to the republic. It would, on the contrary, be the most revolution- ary that you have adopted. You would exterminate all your enemies by the guillotine! But was there ever greater mad- ness ? Can you possibly destroy one enemy on the scaffold without making ten others among his family and friends ? Do you believe that those whom you have imprisoned — these women and old men, these self-indulgent valetudina- rians, these stragglers of the Revolution — are really dan- gerous ? Only those among your enemies have remained among you who are cowardly or sick. The strong and courageous have emigrated. They have perished at Lyons or in the Vendee. The remnant which still lingers does not deserve your anger. . . . Moreover it has not been love of the republic, but curi- osity, which has every day attracted multitudes to the Place de la Revolution ; it was the new drama which was to be enacted but once. I am sure that the majority of those who frequented this spectacle felt a deep contempt in their hearts for those who subscribed for the theater or opera, where they could only see pasteboard daggers and comedians who
