Though Danton had many and obvious weaknesses he was a good lawyer, and Danton perceived that though he might not have been able to prevent the September massacres, and although they might have been and probably were inevitable under the tension which prevailed, yet that any court, even a political court, would be better than Marat’s mob.  Some months later he explained his position to the Convention when it was considering the erection of the tribunal which finally sent Danton himself to the scaffold.  “Nothing is more difficult than to define a political crime.  But, if a simple citizen, for any ordinary crime, receives immediate punishment, if it is so difficult to reach a political crime, is it not necessary that extraordinary laws ... intimidate the rebels and reach the culpable?  Here public safety requires strong remedies and terrible measures.  I see no compromise between ordinary forms and a revolutionary tribunal.  History attests this truth; and since members have dared in this assembly to refer to those bloody days which every good citizen has lamented, I say that, if such a tribunal had then existed, the people who have been so often and so cruelly reproached for them, would never have stained them with blood; I say, and I shall have the assent of all who have watched these movements, that no human power could have checked the outburst of the national vengeance.”

In this perversion of the courts lay, as I understand it, the foulest horror of the French Revolution.  It was the effect of the rigidity of privilege, a rigidity which found its incarnation in the judiciary.  The constitutional decisions of the parliaments under the old regime would alone have made their continuance impossible, but the worst evil was that, after the shell crumbled, the mind within the shell survived, and discredited the whole regular administration of justice.  When the National Assembly came to examine grievances it found protests against the judicial system from every corner of France, and it referred these petitions to a committee which reported in August, 1789.  Setting aside the centralization and consolidation of the system as being, for us, immaterial, the committee laid down four leading principles of reform.  First, purchase of place should be abolished, and judicial office should be recognized as a public trust.  Second, judges should be confined to applying, and restrained from interpreting, the law.  That is to say, the judges should be forbidden to legislate.  Third, the judges should be brought into harmony with public opinion by permitting the people to participate in their appointment.  Fourth, the tendency toward rigor in criminal cases, which had become a scandal under the old regime, should be tempered by the introduction of the jury.  Bergasse proposed that judicial appointments should be made by the executive from among three candidates selected by the provincial assemblies.  After long and very remarkable debates the plan was,