VERGNIAUD
ing our means of conquest, or of making our defeats less disastrous, why are they preceded to the throne by calumny and there stifled by the most perfidious malevolence? Can it be true that our triumphs are dreaded? Is it of the blood of the army of Coblentz or of our own that they are sparing?
And you, gentlemen, what great thing are you going to undertake for the commonwealth? You whose courage the enemies of the Constitution insolently flatter themselves that they have shaken; you whose consciences they try each day, to alarm by styling the love of liberty as the spirit of faction — as if you could have forgotten that a despotic court also gave the name of factionists to the representatives of the people who went to take the oath of the Tennis-Court[1]; that the cowardly heroes of the aristocracy have constantly lavished it upon the conquerors of the Bastile, upon all those who made and maintained the Revolution, and which the Constituent Assembly believed it to be its duty to honor it by proclaiming in one of its addresses that the nation was composed of twenty-four millions of factionists; you who have been so calumniated because you are almost all foreign to the caste which the Revolution threw down into the dust, and because the intriguers who desired to reestablish it, and the degraded men who regret the infamous pleasure of groveling before it,
- ↑ On June 20, 1780.
119
