Finally, it may be asked, could these envelopes go out without his knowledge? To that I answer that such a thing might be done from any government office to-day. It was, moreover, a time of revolution; the whole complicated organism had been shaken and partly transformed; there was confusion in every department of the building, and even under these conditions Danton was doing far more work than depended upon his office. I think, therefore, that it is eminently possible that the circulars should have been sent out by one of the clerks without his knowledge; and the fact that no signature was used, and that the documents did not even pass through one of the many hands whose duty it was to affix the formal stamp, still further corroborates the view that the circulation of the appeal was surreptitious. As to the accusations such as that of Lafayette (Memoirs, iv. 139, 140), “He commanded the massacre of September and paid the murderers, who went all covered with blood to get their money from Roland,” I attach no importance to them at all. Even the phrase in which Danton is supposed to have saluted the return of the murderers from Versailles is very doubtful. It does not occur in any contemporary account; it is not in the _Moniteur_; it is not in the “Révolutions de Paris;” Madame Roland does not quote it, even on hearsay; it is not one of Peltier’s inventions, and I have some difficulty in tracing it to its origin. I think, then, that the general position of Danton during the days of September may be summed up as follows. He did not regard the lives of the prisoners as being of the first importance; he did not use what would have been to his certain knowledge a useless energy in protesting; he did not (as he might conceivably have done) form a special and vigorous tribunal to replace that which was on the point of acquitting L. de Montmorin. By all those, therefore, who would regard public order and a security for life as being more important than the success of a political idea, or the integrity and defence of a nation, he can be accused of a criminal negligence in the matter of the massacres of September. He certainly cannot be accused of having designed them; he cannot be accused on any definite proof of having approved them, and he cannot be accused of having failed to share in the regret and misery which that terrible blunder caused. If we may judge the attitude of his mind by comparing it with that of contemporaries, rather than by comparing it with our own attitude in a time of security and order, we may say that the massacres taught him a more definite lesson than they taught to Roland, for they caused him to pursue a policy of conciliation and to strengthen the government; that, on the other hand, he did less to stop them than Manuel did; and that in a comparison with men whom we know to have been honest, such as Roland himself, or by a contrast with men whom we know to have