Cambon said loftily before the Belgians themselves:  The Belgian war costs us hundreds of millions.  Their ordinary revenues, and even some extraordinary taxes, will not answer to our reimbursements; and yet we have occasion for them.  The mortgage of our assignats draws near its end.  What must be done?  Sell the Church property of Brabant.  There is a mortgage of two thousand millions (eighty millions sterling).  How shall we get possession of them?  By an immediate union.  Instantly they decreed this union.  Men’s minds were not disposed to it.  What does it signify?  Let us make them vote by means of money.  Without delay, therefore, they secretly order the Minister of Foreign Affairs to dispose of four or five hundred thousand livres (20,000_l._ sterling) to make the vagabonds of Brussels drunk, and to buy proselytes to the union in all the States.  But even these means, it was said, will obtain but a weak minority in our favor.  What does that signify? Revolutions, said they, are made only by minorities.  It is the minority which has made the Revolution of France; it is a minority which, has made the people triumph.

The Belgic Provinces were not sufficient to satisfy the voracious cravings of this financial system.  Cambon wanted to unite everything, that he might sell everything.  Thus he forced the union of Savoy.  In the war with Holland, he saw nothing but gold to seize on, and assignats to sell at par.[11] “Do not let us dissemble,” said he one day to the Committee of General Defence, in presence even of the patriot deputies of Holland, “you have no ecclesiastical goods to offer us for our indemnity.  IT IS A REVOLUTION IN THEIR COUNTERS AND IRON CHESTS[12] that must be made amongst the DUTCH.”  The word was said, and the bankers Abema and Van Staphorst understood it.

Do you think that that word has not been worth an army to the Stadtholder? that it has not cooled the ardor of the Dutch patriots? that it has not commanded the vigorous defence of Williamstadt?

Do you believe that the patriots of Amsterdam, when they read the preparatory decree which gave France an execution on their goods,—­do you believe that those patriots would not have liked better to have remained under the government of the Stadtholder, who took from them no more than a fixed portion of their property, than to pass under that of a revolutionary power, which would make a complete revolution in their bureaus and strong-boxes, and reduce them to wretchedness and rags?[13] Robbery and anarchy, instead of encouraging, will always stifle revolutions.

“But why,” they object to me, “have not you and your friends chosen to expose these measures in the rostrum of the National Convention?  Why have you not opposed yourself to all these fatal projects of union?”

There are two answers to make here,—­one general, one particular.

You complain of the silence of honest men!  You quite forget, then, honest men are the objects of your suspicion.  Suspicion, if it does not stain the soul of a courageous man, at least arrests his thoughts in their passage to his lips.  The suspicions of a good citizen freeze those men whom the calumny of the wicked could not stop in their progress.