The Assembly was not blinded by these manifestations; it saw beneath a secret design of escaping from the severest measures; it was desirous of compelling the king to carry them out, and, let us add, the nation and the public safety also required it.

XII.

Mirabeau had treated the question of the emigration of the Constituent Assembly rather as a philosopher than a statesman.  He had disputed with the legislator the right of making laws against emigration:  he was mistaken.  Whenever a theory is in contradiction to the welfare of society it is because that theory is false, for society is the supreme truth.

Unquestionably in ordinary times, man is not imprisoned by nature, and ought not to be by the law, within the frontiers of his native land; and, with this view, the laws against emigration should only be exceptional laws.  But, because exceptional, are these laws therefore unjust?  Evidently not.  The public danger has its peculiar laws, as necessary and as just as laws made in a time of security.  A state of war is not a state of peace.  You shut your frontiers to strangers in war time; you may close them to your citizens.  A city is legally put in a state of siege during a sedition.  We can put the nation in a state of siege in case of external danger co-existent with internal conspiracy.  By what absurd abuse of liberty can a state be constrained to tolerate on a foreign soil gatherings of citizens armed against itself, which it would not tolerate in its own land?  And if these gatherings should be culpable without, why should the state be interdicted from shutting up those roads which lead emigrants to these gatherings?  A nation defends itself from its foreign enemies by arms, from its internal foes by its laws.  To act otherwise would be to consecrate without the country the inviolability of conspiracies which were punished within:  it would be to proclaim the legality of civil war, provided it was mixed up with foreign war, and that sedition was covered by treason.  Such maxims ruin a whole people’s nationality, in order to protect abuse of liberty by certain citizens.  The Constituent Assembly was so wrong as to sanction such.  Had it proclaimed from the beginning the laws repressive of emigration in troubled times, during revolutions, or on the eve of war, it would have proclaimed a national truth, and prevented one of the great dangers and principal causes of the excesses of the Revolution.  The question now was no longer to be treated with reason, but by vindictive feelings.  The imprudence of the Constituent Assembly had left this dangerous weapon in the hands of parties who were about to turn it against the king.

XIII.

Brissot, the inspirer of the Gironde, the dogmatic statesman of a party which needed ideas and a leader, ascended the tribune in the midst of anticipated plaudits, which betokened his importance in the new Assembly.  His voice was for war, as the most efficacious of laws.