"La terreur dominait tous les esprits, comprimait tous les couers—­ elle etait la force du gouvernement, et ce gouvernement etait tel, que les nombreux habitans d’un vaste territoire semblaient avoir perdu les qualites qui distinguent l’homme de l’animal domestique:  ils semblaient meme n’avoir de vie que ce que le gouvernement voulait bien leur en accorder.—­Le moi humain n’existoit plus; chaque individu n’etait qu’une machine, allant, venant, pensant ou ne pensant pas, felon que la tyrannie le pressait ou l’animait."

     Discours de Bailleul, 19 March 1795.

“The minds of all were subdued by terror, and every heart was
compressed beneath its influence.—­In this consisted the strength of
the government; and that government was such, that the immense
population of a vast territory, seemed to have lost all the
qualities which distinguish man from the animals attached to him.—­
They appeared to exhibit no signs of life but such as their rulers
condescended to permit—­the very sense of existence seemed doubtful
or extinct, and each individual was reduced to a mere machine, going
or coming, thinking or not thinking, according as the impulse of
tyranny gave him force or animation.” 

                                          Speech of Bailleul, 19 March 1795.

On the twenty-second of Prairial, (June 10,) a law, consisting of a variety of articles for the regulation of the Revolutionary Tribunal, was introduced to the convention by Couthon, a member of the government; and, as usual adopted with very little previous discussion.—­Though there was no clause of this act but ought to have given the alarm to humanity, “knocked at the heart, and bid it not be quiet;” yet the whole appeared perfectly unexceptionable to the Assembly in general:  till, on farther examination, they found it contained an implied repeal of the law hitherto observed, according to which, no representative could be arrested without a preliminary decree for that purpose.—­This discovery awakened their suspicions, and the next day Bourdon de l’Oise, a man of unsteady principles, (even as a revolutionist,) was spirited up to demand an explicit renunciation of any power in the Committee to attack the legislative inviolability except in the accustomed forms.—­The clauses which elected a jury of murderers, that bereft all but guilt of hope, and offered no prospect to innocence but death, were passed with no other comment than the usual one of applause.*—­

* The baseness, cruelty, and cowardice of the Convention are neither to be denied, nor palliated.  For several months they not only passed decrees of proscription and murder which might reach every individual in France except themselves, but they even sacrificed numbers of their own body; and if, instead of proposing an article affecting the whole Convention, the Committee had demanded the heads of as many Deputies as