vindictive; convulsed since the outbreak of the Revolution with every passion that sways men in the mass; taught no conception of progress but the overthrow of authority, and acquainted with no title to power but that which was bestowed by itself. If the Girondins were to remain in power, they could do so only by drawing an army from the departments, or by identifying themselves with the multitude. They declined to take either course. Their audience was in the Assembly alone; their support in the distant provinces. Paris, daily more violent, listened to men of another stamp. The Municipality defied the Government; the Mountain answered the threats and invectives of the majority in the Assembly by displays of popular menace and tumult. In the eyes of the common people, who after so many changes of government found themselves more famished and more destitute than ever, the Gironde was now but the last of a succession of tyrannies; its statesmen but impostors who stood between the people and the enjoyment of their liberty. Among the leaders of the Mountain, Danton aimed at the creation of a central Revolutionary Government, armed with absolute powers for the prosecution of the war; and he attacked the Girondins only when they themselves had rejected his support. Robespierre, himself the author of little beyond destruction, was the idol of those whom Rousseau's writings had filled with the idea of a direct exercise of sovereignty by the people. It was in the trial of the King that the Gironde first confessed its submission to the democracy of Paris. The Girondins in their hearts desired to save the King; they voted for his death with the hope of maintaining their influence in Paris, and of clearing themselves from the charge of lukewarmness in the cause of the Revolution. But the sacrifice was as vain as it was dishonourable. The populace and the party of the Mountain took the act in its true character, as an acknowledgment of their own victory. A series of measures was brought forward providing for the poorer classes at the expense of the wealthy. The Gironde, now forced to become the defenders of property, encountered the fatal charge of deserting the cause of the people; and from this time nothing but successful foreign warfare could have saved their party from ruin. [Defeat and treason of Dumouriez, March, 1793.]