Another class will of course be included in the indemnity,—­namely, all those who by their activity in restoring lawful government shall obliterate their offences.  The offence previously known, the acceptance of service is a pardon for crimes.  I fear that this class of men will not be very numerous.

So far as to indemnity.  But where are the objects of justice, and of example, and of future security to the public peace?  They are naturally pointed out, not by their having outraged political and civil laws, nor their having rebelled against the state as a state, but by their having rebelled against the law of Nature and outraged man as man.  In this list, all the regicides in general, all those who laid sacrilegious hands on the king, who, without anything in their own rebellious mission to the Convention to justify them, brought him to his trial and unanimously voted him guilty,—­all those who had a share in the cruel murder of the queen, and the detestable proceedings with regard to the young king and the unhappy princesses,—­all those who committed cold-blooded murder anywhere, and particularly in their revolutionary tribunals, where every idea of natural justice and of their own declared rights of man have been trod under foot with the most insolent mockery,—­all men concerned in the burning and demolition of houses or churches, with audacious and marked acts of sacrilege and scorn offered to religion,—­in general, all the leaders of Jacobin clubs,—­not one of these should escape a punishment suitable to the nature, quality, and degree of their offence, by a steady, but a measured justice.

In the first place, no man ought to be subject to any penalty, from the highest to the lowest, but by a trial according to the course of law, carried on with all that caution and deliberation which has been used in the best times and precedents of the French jurisprudence, the criminal law of which country, faulty to be sure in some particulars, was highly laudable and tender of the lives of men.  In restoring order and justice, everything like retaliation ought to be religiously avoided; and an example ought to be set of a total alienation from the Jacobin proceedings in their accursed revolutionary tribunals.  Everything like lumping men in masses, and of forming tables of proscription, ought to be avoided.

In all these punishments, anything which can be alleged in mitigation of the offence should be fully considered.  Mercy is not a thing opposed to justice.  It is an essential part of it,—­as necessary in criminal cases as in civil affairs equity is to law.  It is only for the Jacobins never to pardon.  They have not done it in a single instance.  A council of mercy ought therefore to be appointed, with powers to report on each case, to soften the penalty, or entirely to remit it, according to circumstances.