time he put the same question to a tribune, who, from the desire of pleasing him, answered:  “Well, general, if our enemies take measures against us, we are in the right to do the same against them;” not perceiving that this was tantamount to a confession that the deed was atrocious.  The first consul affected to consider this act as dictated by reasons of state.  One day, about this period, in a discussion with an intelligent man about the plays of Corneille, he said, “You see that the public safety, or to express it better, that state necessity, has with the moderns been substituted in the place of the fatality of the ancients:  there is, for instance, such a man, who naturally would be incapable of a crime, but political circumstances impose it upon him as a law.  Corneille is the only one who has shewn, in his tragedies, an acquaintance with state necessity; on that account, if he had lived in my time, I would have made him my prime minister.”  All this appearance of good humour in the discussion was intended to prove that there was nothing of passion in the death of the Duke d’Enghien, and that circumstances, meaning such as the head of the state is exclusively the judge of, might cause and justify every thing.  That there was nothing of passion in his resolution about the Duke d’Enghien, is perfectly true; people would have it that rage inspired the crime,—­it had nothing to do with it.  By what could this rage have been provoked?  The Duke d’Enghien had in no way provoked the first consul:  Bonaparte hoped at first to have got hold of the Duke de Berry, who it was said, was to have landed in Normandy, if Pichegru had given him notice that it was a proper time.  This prince is nearer the throne than the Duke d’Enghien, and besides, he would by coming into France have infringed the existing laws.  It therefore suited Bonaparte in every way better to have sacrificed him than the Duke d’Enghien; but as he could not get at the first, he chose the second, in discussing the matter in cold blood.  Between the order for carrying him off, and that for his execution, more than eight days had elapsed, and Bonaparte ordered the punishment of the Duke d’Enghien long beforehand, as coolly, as he has since sacrificed millions of men to the caprices of his ambition.  We now ask, what were the motives of this horrible action, and I believe it is very easy to penetrate them.  First, Bonaparte wished to secure the revolutionary party, by contracting with it an alliance of blood.  An old jacobin, when he heard the news, exclaimed, “So much the better!  General Bonaparte is now become one of the convention.”  For a long time the jacobins would only have a man who had voted for the death of the king, for the first magistrate of the republic; that was what they termed, giving pledges to the revolution.  Bonaparte fulfilled this condition of crime, substituted for that of property required in other countries; he thus afforded the certainty that he would never serve the Bourbons; and thus such of that party as attached themselves to his, burnt their vessels, never to return.