The Convention is now overawed and controlled by the Commune and the clubs.  Lafayette flies.  The mob rules Paris.  The revolutionary tribunal is decreed.  Robespierre, Marat, and Danton form a triumvirate of power.  The September massacres take place.  The Girondists become conservative, and attempt to stay the progress of further excesses,—­all to no purpose, for the King himself is now impeached, and the Jacobins control everything.  The King is led to the bar of the Convention.  He is condemned by a majority only of one, and immured in the Temple.  On the 20th of January, 1793, he was condemned, and the next day he mounted the scaffold.  “We have burned our ships,” said Marat when the tragedy was consummated.

With the death of the King, I bring this lecture to a close.  It would be interesting to speculate on what might have been averted, had Mirabeau lived.  But probably nothing could have saved the monarchy except civil war, to which Louis XVI. was averse.

Nor can I dwell on the second part of the Revolution, when the government was in the hands of those fiends and fanatics who turned France into one vast slaughter-house of butchery and blood.  I have only to say, that the same unseen hand which humiliated the nobles, impoverished the clergy, and destroyed the King, also visited with retribution those monsters who had a leading hand in the work of destruction.  Marat, the infidel journalist, was stabbed by Charlotte Corday.  Danton, the minister of justice and orator of the revolutionary clubs, was executed on the scaffold he had erected for so many innocent men.  Robespierre, the sentimental murderer and arch-conspirator, also expiated his crimes on the scaffold; as did Saint-Just, Lebas, Couthon, Henriot, and other legalized assassins.  As the Girondists sacrificed the royal family, so did the Jacobins sacrifice the Girondists; and the Convention, filled with consternation, again sacrificed the Jacobins.

After the work of destruction was consummated, and there was nothing more to destroy, and starvation was imminent at Paris, and general detestation began to prevail, in view of the atrocities committed in the name of liberty, the crushing fact became apparent that the nations of Europe were arming to put down the Revolution and restore the monarchy.  In a generous paroxysm of patriotism, the whole nation armed to resist the invaders and defend the ideas of the Revolution.  The Convention also perceived, too late, that anything was better than anarchy and license.  It put down the clubs, restored religious worship, destroyed the busts of the monsters who had disgraced their cause and country, intrusted supreme power to five Directors, able and patriotic, and dissolved itself.