We have already seen that the Statesmen, and Revolutionists, Constitutionalists, and Girondists, Aristocrats, and Jacobins, were all in favour of war.  War was, in the eyes of all, an appeal to destiny, and the impatient spirit of France wished that it would pronounce at once, either by victory or defeat.  Victory seemed to France the sole issue by which she could extricate herself from her difficulties at home, and even defeat did not terrify her.  She believed in the necessity of war, and defied even death.  Robespierre thought otherwise, and it is for that reason that he was Robespierre.

He clearly comprehended two things; the first, that war was a gratuitous crime against the people; the second, that a war, even though successful, would ruin the cause of democracy.  Robespierre looked on the Revolution as the rigorous application of the principles of philosophy to society.  A passionate and devoted pupil of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the Contrat Social was his gospel; war, made with the blood of the people, was in the eyes of this philosopher—­what it must ever be in the eyes of the wise—­wholesale slaughter to gratify the ambition of a few, glorious only when it is defensive.  Robespierre did not consider France placed in such a position as to render it absolutely necessary for her safety that the human vein should be opened, whence would flow such torrents of blood.  Embued with a firm conviction of the omnipotence of the new ideas on which he nourished faith and fanaticism within a heart closed against intrigue, he did not fear that a few fugitive princes, destitute of credit, and some thousand aristocratic emigres, would impose laws or conditions on a nation whose first struggle for liberty had shaken the throne, the nobility, and the clergy.  Neither did he think that the disunited and wavering powers of Europe would venture to declare war against a nation that proclaimed peace so long as we did not attack them.  But should the European cabinets be sufficiently mad to attempt this new crusade against human reason, then Robespierre fully believed they would be defeated, for he knew that there lies invincible force in, the justice of a cause—­that right doubles the energy of a nation, that despair often supplies the want of weapons, and that God and men were for the people.

He thought, moreover, that if it was the duty of France to propagate the advantages and the light of reason and liberty, the natural and peaceful extension of the French Revolution in the world would prove far more infallible than our arms,—­that the Revolution should be a doctrine and not an universal monarchy realised by the sword, and that the patriotism of nations should not coalesce against his dogmata.  Their strength was in their minds, for in his eyes the power of the Revolution lay in its enlightenment.  But he understood more:  he understood that an offensive war would inevitably ruin the Revolution, and annihilate that premature republic of which the