However, after what had passed had been praised, or excused, or pardoned, he declares loudly against such proceedings in future.  Crimes had pioneered and made smooth the way for the march of the virtues, and from that time order and justice and a sacred regard for personal property were to become the rules for the new democracy.  Here Roland and the Brissotins leagued for their own preservation, by endeavoring to preserve peace.  This short story will render many of the parts of Brissot’s pamphlet, in which Roland’s views and intentions are so often alluded to, the more intelligible in themselves, and the more useful in their application by the English reader.

Under the cover of these artifices, Roland, Brissot, and their party hoped to gain the bankers, merchants, substantial tradesmen, hoarders of assignats, and purchasers of the confiscated lands of the clergy and gentry to join with their party, as holding out some sort of security to the effects which they possessed, whether these effects were the acquisitions of fair commerce, or the gains of jobbing in the misfortunes of their country and the plunder of their fellow-citizens.  In this design the party of Roland and Brissot succeeded in a great degree.  They obtained a majority in the National Convention.  Composed, however, as that assembly is, their majority was far from steady.  But whilst they appeared to gain the Convention, and many of the outlying departments, they lost the city of Paris entirely and irrecoverably:  it was fallen into the hands of Marat, Robespierre, and Danton.  Their instruments were the sans-culottes, or rabble, who domineered in that capital, and were wholly at the devotion of those incendiaries, and received their daily pay.  The people of property were of no consequence, and trembled before Marat and his janizaries.  As that great man had not obtained the helm of the state, it was not yet come to his turn to act the part of Brissot and his friends in the assertion of subordination and regular government.  But Robespierre has survived both these rival chiefs, and is now the great patron of Jacobin order.

To balance the exorbitant power of Paris, (which threatened to leave nothing to the National Convention but a character as insignificant as that which the first Assembly had assigned to the unhappy Louis the Sixteenth,) the faction of Brissot, whose leaders were Roland, Petion, Vergniaud, Isnard, Condorcet, &c., &c., &c., applied themselves to gain the great commercial towns, Lyons, Marseilles, Rouen, Nantes, and Bordeaux.  The republicans of the Brissotin description, to whom the concealed royalists, still very numerous, joined themselves, obtained a temporary superiority in all these places.  In Bordeaux, on account of the activity and eloquence of some of its representatives, this superiority was the most distinguished.  This last city is seated on the Garonne, or Gironde; and being the centre of a department named from that