without distinction of age, sex, or condition.  Madame Roland was nearly frantic over these scenes.  Her divinity had turned to Moloch in her very presence.  Her husband called for troops to stop the horrible massacre, but none were furnished, and it went on until men were too tired to slay.  These acts were doubtless incited by the Jacobin leaders, though they cloaked with secrecy their complicity in these great crimes.  The Jacobins became all-powerful.  The Girondists became the party of the past, and from this time their history is a record of a party in name, but in such act of dissolution as to make its efforts spasmodic, clique-like, and personal; sometimes grand, sometimes cruel, and often cowardly.  They were under the coercion of public opinion, but were dragged instead of driven by it.  They frequently held back, but this was merely a halt, which accelerated the rapidity of the march which left them at the scaffold, where they regained their heroism in the presence of death, while the bloody mob went on to a similar ending a little distance beyond.

When the lull came, after the massacre, the two parties stood looking at each other across the river of blood.  The Jacobins accused the Girondists of being enemies of the country.  It is characteristic of revolutionary times to accuse vaguely and to punish severely.  Socrates died as an alleged corrupter of youth.  Pilate, after acquitting Jesus of the crime of high treason, suffered him to be executed for “teaching throughout all Jewry.”  “Roundhead” and “Cavalier” were once expressive terms of condemnation.  In our own times the words “slave-holder,” “abolitionist,” “loyal,” “disloyal,” and “rebel” have formed the compendious summing up of years of history.  An indictment is compressed into an epithet in such times.  In the time of Madame Roland, to be “a suspect” was to be punishable with death.  So the Jacobins suspected the Girondists, and accused them of being enemies of France.  They introduced measures which pandered to the bloodthirst of the mob, and for which the Girondists were compelled either to vote or to draw upon themselves its vengeance.  Madame Roland urged and entreated the Girondists to make one last struggle for law, liberty, and order, by moving to bring to justice the ringleaders in the massacre, including the Jacobin chiefs, who instigated it.  This issue was made in the assembly, but it was voted down before the tiger-roar of the mob which raged in the hall.  The Jacobins resolved to destroy Madame Roland, whose courage had prompted this attack upon them, and for which she had become the object of their intensest hate.  They suborned an adventurer named Viard to accuse her of being privy to a correspondence with the English Government for the purpose of saving the life of the king.  She was summoned before the assembly to confront her accuser.  She appeared in the midst of her enemies, armed with innocence, resplendent with beauty, defended by her own genius.  Her very presence extorted applause from reluctant lips.  She looked upon her accuser, and he faltered.  By a few womanly words she tore his calumny into shreds, and left amid plaudits.  Justice thus returned once more to illumine that place by a fleeting gleam, and then with this woman left it forever.