were noble as his words, and he adored the Revolution as a sublime philosophy destined to ennoble the nation without immolating on its altars other victims than prejudices and tyranny. He had doctrines, and no hatreds; the thirst of glory, and not of ambition,--nay, power itself, was in his eyes, too real, too vulgar a thing for him to aim at, and he disdained it for himself, and alone sought it for his ideas. Glory and posthumous fame were his objects alone; he mounted the tribune to behold them, and he beheld them later from the scaffold; and he plunged into the future, young, handsome, immortal in the annals of France, with all his enthusiasm, and some few stains, already effaced in his generous blood. Such was the man whom nature had given to the Girondists as their chief. He disdained the office, although he possessed all the qualities and the views, of a statesman; too careless to be the leader of a party, too great to be second to any one. Such was Vergniaud,--more illustrious than useful to his friends; he would not lead, but immortalised, them. We will describe this great man more in detail at the period when his talent places him in a more conspicuous situation. "Are there circumstances," said he "in which the natural rights of man can permit a nation to adopt any measure against emigrations?" Vergniaud spoke against those pretended natural rights, and recognised, above all individual rights, the right of society, which comprises and dominates over all, just as the whole predominates over a portion: he compared political liberty to the right of a citizen to do what he pleases, provided he do nothing injurious to his country; but there he stops. Man can, no doubt, materially use this right to abdicate the country in which he was born and to which he belongs, as the limb belongs to the body, but this abdication is treason; for it severs the union between the nation and himself, and the nation no longer owes him or his property any protection. After having on this principle destroyed the puerile distinction between the functionary and the mere emigrant, he proved that society falls into decay if she refuse herself the right of retaining those who forsake her in her hour of danger and difficulty. When she gave him all the universe for his country, she refused him that which gave him birth. But what will be the consequence if this emigrant, ceasing to play merely the part of a cowardly fugitive, becomes a foe, and, assembling with his fellow-traitors, surrounds the nation with a band of conspirators? What, shall attack be permitted to the emigres, and good citizens forbidden to defend themselves? XVI.