“I regard the tax that has been levied from such houses as a disgraceful tribute.  I do not think that it is allowable to employ a revenue derived from vice and disorder, even to do good.  In consequence of these principles, I have never granted any permit to gambling-houses; I have constantly refused them.  I have constantly announced that not only they would not be tolerated, but that they would be sought out and prosecuted.”

If I add that Bailly suppressed all spectacles of animal-fighting, at which the multitude cannot fail to acquire ferocious and sanguinary habits, I shall have a right to ask of every superficial writer, how he would justify the epithet of sterile, applied with such assurance to the administration of our virtuous colleague.

Anxious to carry out in practice that which had been largely recognized theoretically in the declaration of rights—­the complete separation of religion from civil law,—­Bailly presented himself before the National Assembly on the 14th of May, 1791, and demanded, in the name of the city of Paris, the abolition of an order of things which, in the then state of men’s minds, gave rise to great abuses.  If declarations of births, of marriages, and of deaths are now received by civil officers in a form agreeing with all religious opinions, the country is chiefly indebted for it to the intelligent firmness of Bailly.

The unfortunate beings for whom all public men should feel most solicitous, are those prisoners who are awaiting in prison the decrees of the courts of justice.  Bailly took care not to neglect such a duty.  At the end of 1790, the old tribunals had no moral power; they could no longer act; the new ones were not yet created.  This state of affairs distracted the mind of our colleague.  On the 18th of November, he expressed his grief to the National Assembly, in terms full of sensibility and kindness.  I should be culpable if I left them in oblivion.

“Gentlemen, the prisons are full.  The innocent are awaiting their justification, and the criminals an end to their remorse.  All breathe an unwholesome air, and disease will pronounce terrible decrees.  Despair dwells there:  Despair says, either give me death, or judge me.  When we visit those prisons, that is what the fathers of the poor and the unfortunate hear; this is what it is their duty to repeat to the fathers of their country.  We must tell them that in those asylums of crime, of misery, and of every grief, time is infinite in its duration; a month is a century, a month is an abyss the sight of which is frightful....  We ask of the tribunals to empty the prisons by the justification of the innocent, or by examples of justice.”

Does it not appear to you, Gentlemen, that calm times may occasionally derive excellent lessons, and, moreover, lessons expressed in very good language, from our revolutionary epoch?

FOOTNOTE: 

[13] “The wall walling Paris, renders Paris wailing.”