On the new standards waving in the breeze ran the legend: "The French people risen against Tyrants." Toulon was in the hands of the English; Lyons in revolt. With enemies in her camp, with one arm tied by the insurrection in La Vendée, the Revolution hurled her ragged and despised _sans-culottes_, shod in pasteboard or straw bands, mantled in a piece of matting skewered above their shoulders, against her enemies. How vain is the wisdom of the great! Burke thought that the Revolution had expunged France in a political sense out of the system of Europe, and his opinion was shared by every statesman in Europe, but before the year closed the proud and magnificently accoutred armies of kings were scattered over the borders, civil war was crushed at home, the Revolution triumphant. The Convention fixed the day of victory. It ordered its generals to end the war of La Vendée by 20th October: by the 17th four defeats had been inflicted on the insurgents, and 60,000 men, women and children were driven over the Loire. Soon the "dwarfish, ragged _sans-culottes_, the small, black-looking Marseillaise dressed in rags of every colour," whom Goethe saw tramping out of Mayence "as if the goblin king had opened his mountains and sent forth his lively host of dwarfs," had forced Prussia, the arch-champion of monarchy, to make peace and leave its Rhine provinces in the hands of regicides. Meanwhile terror reigned in Paris. In the frenzy of mortal strife the Revolution struck out blindly and cut down friend as well as foe; the innocent with the guilty. At least the guillotine fell swiftly and mercifully. Gone were the days of the wheel, the rack, the boiling lead and the stake. Under the _ancien régime_ the torture of _accused_ persons was one of the sights shown to foreigners in Paris. Evelyn, when visiting the city in 1651, was taken to see the torture of an _alleged_ thief in the Châtelet, who was "wracked in an extraordinary manner, so that they severed the fellow's joints in miserable sort." Then, failing to extort a confession, "they increased the extension and torture, and then placing a horne in his mouth, such as they drench horses with, poured two buckets of water down, so that it prodigiously swelled him." There was another "malefactor" to be dealt with, but the traveller had seen enough, and he leaves reflecting that it represented to him "the intolerable sufferings which our Blessed Saviour must needs undergo when His body was hanging with all its weight upon the nailes of the Crosse." Too much prominence has been given by historians to the dramatic and violent activities of the men of '93, to the exclusion of acts of peaceful and constructive statesmanship. Among the 11,210 decrees issued by the National Convention in Paris from September '92 to October '95, the following are cited by Louis Blanc:-- That _maisons nationales_ be opened where children should be fed, housed and taught gratuitously.