It will be asked, how the Minister of the Home Department was employed at this crisis.  The day after the massacre had commenced, Roland appeared; but not with the powerful apparatus of a protecting magistrate, to rescue those who had survived the slaughter of the first day:  nothing of this.  On the 3rd of September, (that is, the day after the commencement of the massacre,[3]) he writes a long, elaborate, verbose epistle to the Assembly, in which, after magnifying, according to the bon-ton of the Revolution, his own integrity, humanity, courage, and patriotism, he first directly justifies all the bloody proceedings of the 10th of August.  He considers the slaughter of that day as a necessary measure for defeating a conspiracy which (with a full knowledge of the falsehood of his assertion) he asserts to have been formed for a massacre of the people of Paris, and which he more than insinuates was the work of his late unhappy master,—­who was universally known to carry his dread of shedding the blood of his most guilty subjects to an excess.

“Without the day of the 10th,” says he, “it is evident that we should have been lost.  The court, prepared for a long time, waited for the hour which was to accumulate all treasons, to display over Paris the standard of death, and to reign there by terror.  The sense of the people, (le sentiment,) always just and ready when their opinion is not corrupted, foresaw the epoch marked for their destruction, and rendered it fatal to the conspirators.”  He then proceeds, in the cant which has been applied to palliate all their atrocities from the 14th of July, 1789, to the present time:—­“It is in the nature of things,” continues he, “and in that of the human heart, that victory should bring with it some excess.  The sea, agitated by a violent storm, roars long after the tempest; but everything has bounds, which ought at length to be observed.”

In this memorable epistle, he considers such excesses as fatalities arising from the very nature of things, and consequently not to be punished.  He allows a space of time for the duration of these agitations; and lest he should be thought rigid and too scanty in his measure, he thinks it may be long.  But he would have things to cease at length.  But when? and where?—­When they may approach his own person.

“Yesterday,” says he, “the ministers were denounced:  vaguely, indeed, as to the matter, because subjects of reproach were wanting; but with that warmth and force of assertion which strike the imagination and seduce it for a moment, and which mislead and destroy confidence, without which no man should remain in place in a free government. Yesterday, again, in an assembly of the presidents of all the sections, convoked by the ministers, with the view of conciliating all minds, and of mutual explanation, I perceived that distrust which suspects, interrogates, and fetters operations.”