Consider these contrasting pictures: Danton, up to the death of the King, seems uniquely occupied in pursuing the threads of a very careful diplomacy, and in welding as far as possible the opposing factions of the Parliament. Of course, his general theories in politics remain unaltered, but something has happened which makes him, on returning from Belgium for the second time, pursue this different policy: the immediate construction of a strong central government, and the providing of it with exceptional and terrible machinery. He works this as absolutely the unique policy. He seems to have forgotten all questions of diplomacy, nearly to have despaired of settling the quarrel between Paris and the Girondins. In fine, Danton, when first in power, had been a man so representative of France as to have many different objects, and to attempt their co-ordination. We see him the brief fortnight of Louis’s execution violent, angry, unreasoning; we see him again in less than a month transformed into a man with a single object, pursued and succeeded in with the tenacity common to minds much narrower than his own. I know that events will largely account for the change. The Girondins had repelled him; diplomacy had no further object when once the universal war was declared; the grave perils, and later the disasters of the French armies, which he had seen with his own eyes, called imperatively for a dictatorship. Nevertheless events will not of themselves account for the very great transformation in all that he says and does. I believe that we must look to another cause—one of those causes which historians neglect, but which in the lives of individuals are of far more importance than their political surroundings. By nature he had great tendencies to indolence as well as to violence. He was capable of temporising to a dangerous extent, and this, I think, was largely the cause of his action in the autumn. But such natures are also of the kind which disaster spurs to action. As we have seen, the return in January to his household, ruined by an impending fate, made him the violent and bitter speaker who spoiled his own plans by his own speeches. But returning from Belgium in February, not a menace but a definite disaster awoke in him a much more useful energy.