Whilst, however, he defends these acts, he is conscious that they will appear in another light to the world.  He therefore acquits the executive power, that is, he acquits himself, (but only by his own assertion,) of those acts of “vengeance mixed with a sort of justice,” as an “excess which he could neither foresee nor prevent.”  He could not, he says, foresee these acts, when he tells us the people of Paris had sagacity so well to foresee the designs of the court on the 10th of August,—­to foresee them so well as to mark the precise epoch on which they were to be executed, and to contrive to anticipate them on the very day:  he could not foresee these events, though he declares in this very letter that victory must bring with it some excess,—­that “the sea roars long after the tempest.”  So far as to his foresight.  As to his disposition to prevent, if he had foreseen, the massacres of that day,—­this will be judged by his care in putting a stop to the massacre then going on.  This was no matter of foresight:  he was in the very midst of it.  He does not so much as pretend that he had used any force to put a stop to it.  But if he had used any, the sanction given under his hand to a sort of justice in the murderers was enough to disarm the protecting force.

That approbation of what they had already done had its natural effect on the executive assassins, then in the paroxysm of their fury, as well as on their employers, then in the midst of the execution of their deliberate, cold-blooded system of murder.  He did not at all differ from either of them in the principle of those executions, but only in the time of their duration,—­and that only as it affected himself.  This, though to him a great consideration, was none to his confederates, who were at the same time his rivals.  They were encouraged to accomplish the work they had in hand.  They did accomplish it; and whilst this grave moral epistle from a grave minister, recommending a cessation of their work of “vengeance mingled with a sort of justice,” was before a grave assembly, the authors of the massacres proceeded without interruption in their business for four days together,—­that is, until the seventh of that month, and until all the victims of the first proscription in Paris and at Versailles and several other places were immolated at the shrine of the grim Moloch of liberty and equality.  All the priests, all the loyalists, all the first essayists and novices of revolution in 1789, that could be found, were promiscuously put to death.

Through the whole of this long letter of Roland, it is curious to remark how the nerve and vigor of his style, which had spoken so potently to his sovereign, is relaxed when he addresses himself to the sans-culottes,—­how that strength and dexterity of arm, with which he parries and beats down the sceptre, is enfeebled and lost when he comes to fence with the poniard.  When he speaks to the populace, he can no longer be direct.  The whole compass of the language is tried to find synonymes and circumlocutions for massacre and murder.  Things are never called by their common names.  Massacre is sometimes agitation, sometimes effervescence, sometimes excess, sometimes too continued an exercise of a revolutionary power.