The Jacobins pressed the trial of the king.  The mob demanded him as a victim.  The Girondists voted with the Jacobins that he was guilty; but they voted to leave the sentence to the determination of the French people, and when they were defeated in this they voted for his death.  I am unable to find any thing in the memorials of Madame Roland which shows that she had any sympathy with this.  What is written tends rather to show that she was in the very apathy and lassitude of horror.  From the time when her courageous effort to work justice upon the abettors and perpetrators of the massacre failed, her history ceases to be political and becomes personal.

The revolutionary tribunal was reorganized, consisting of twenty judges, a jury, and a public accuser.  Merlin of Douai, a consummate jurist, proposed a statute, in every line of which suspicion, treachery, and hate found an arsenal of revenge.  It provided that:  “Immediately after the publication of this present decree, all suspected persons who are found in the territory of the republic, and who are still at liberty, shall be arrested.

“Are deemed suspected all persona who, by their conduct, writings, or language, have proved themselves partisans of tyranny, federalism, and enemies of liberty;

“Those who can not prove they possess the means of existence, and that they have fully performed all of their duties as citizens;

“Those to whom certificates of citizenship have been refused;

“Those of noble families—­fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, sisters, husbands, wives, and agents—­who have not constantly manifested their attachment to the Revolution.”

The traveler, standing upon the stone seats of the Flavian amphitheater, looks down into the arena, and peoples the Coliseum with the criminals and the innocent martyrs, shut out from hope by its merciless walls and by a populace more merciless, and slain by thousands by wild beasts and swordsmen and spearsmen, to make a Roman holiday.  How complacently he felicitates himself upon the assumption that modern times present nothing like this.  But less than one hundred years ago, the pen of a lawyer erected in France a statute which inclosed a kingdom with its architectural horror, made one arena of an empire, and in one year drank up more blood than sank into the sands of the Coliseum in centuries.

The revolutionary tribunal was in permanent session.  Its trials were summary.  It heard with predetermination, and decided without evidence.  It was the mere routine formality of death.  Proof often consisted solely in the identification of the person whose death had been predetermined.  Prostitutes sold acquittals, and revenged themselves by convictions.  Paris now ruled France, the Jacobins ruled Paris, and the mob ruled the Jacobins.  They had pressed the Girondists, those men of lofty genius and superb eloquence, from their high position into complicity with crimes with which they had no sympathy, and this want of sympathy now became their crime.  It was resolved to destroy them.  The mob of Paris again came forth.  Devilish men and women again crowded the assembly, and even took part in its deliberations.  The act of accusation was passed, and twenty-six of the leaders of the Gironde went from their places to the scaffold, where they suffered death sublimely.