When Carnot became Minister of War to this dictatorship the Republic had 479,000 demoralized soldiers with the colors, under beaten and discredited commanders.  Bouille had conspired against the States-General, Lafayette against the Legislative Assembly, and Dumouriez against the Convention.  One year from that time it had a superb force, 732,000 strong, commanded by Jourdan and Pichegru, Hoche, Moreau, and Bonaparte.  Above all Carnot loved Hoche.  Up to Valmy the old regular army, however shaken, had remained as a core.  Then it became merged in a mass of volunteers, and these volunteers had to be armed and disciplined and fed and led against the greatest and strongest coalition which the modern world had ever seen.  France, under Camot, became a vast workshop.  Its most eminent scientific men taught the people how to gather saltpetre and the government how to manufacture powder and artillery.  Horses had to be obtained.  Carnot was as reckless of himself as of others.  He knew no rest.  There was that to be done which had to be done quickly and at any cost; there was that or annihilation.

On October 21, 1794, when the people had gathered in the Champ de Mars to celebrate the Festival of Victories, after the President of the Convention had proclaimed that the Republic had been delivered, Carnot announced what had been accomplished.

France had won twenty-seven victories, of which eight had been pitched battles.

One hundred and twenty lesser combats.  France had killed eighty thousand enemies.

Had taken ninety-one thousand prisoners.

Also one hundred and sixteen places or towns, six after siege.

Two hundred and thirty forts or redoubts.

Three thousand eight hundred cannon.

Seventy thousand muskets.

Ninety flags.

As Benjamin Constant has observed, nothing can change the stupendous fact “that the Convention found the enemy at thirty leagues from Paris, ... and made peace at thirty leagues from Vienna.”

Under the stimulus of a change in environment of mind is apt to expand with something of this resistless energy.  It did so in the Reformation.  It may be said almost invariably to do so, when decay does not supervene, and it now concerns us to consider, in some rough way, what the cost to the sinking class of attempting repression may be, when it miscalculates its power in such an emergency.

I take it to be tolerably clear that, if the French privileged classes had accepted the reforms of Turgot in good faith, and thus had spread the movement of the revolution over a generation, there would have been no civil war and no confiscations, save confiscations of ecclesiastical property.  I take it also that there would have been no massacres and no revolutionary tribunals, if France in 1793 had fought foreign enemies alone, as England did in 1688.  Even as it was the courts did not grow thoroughly political until