For more than twenty years I have, in my "History of the Revolution Period," established these circumstances from authentic documents, and thus given repeated offence to the French public. I may therefore be permitted to feel all the greater satisfaction at such a distinguished investigator as Taine, after drawing forth numberless documents from Parisian archives, coming to absolutely the same conclusion. All I have heard in the way of objection to his statements is utterly unimportant. As it is not possible to drive the facts he has proved from original documents out of existence, the observation is made that though his information may be true, it is one-sided; that while he never wearies of describing revolts and misdeeds, he does not sufficiently point out in how many places the Civil Guard bravely and loyally upheld civil order. Taine would be the last to dispute this fact; had it not been so there would have been no longer any France left in the nineteenth century. But he would venture to inquire whether praise be deserved by an Assembly which, as ruler of a great State, surrendered without resistance now the third of it, now the half, during three years, to a bloody anarchy; whether we can speak of "fair days" or "humane Revolution," when in this short period six horrible Jacqueries laid the land waste, when countless political murders remained unpunished, and military _émeutes_ and ecclesiastical brawls thrust the weapons of civil war into the hands of the masses. We are told of a pure and ideal inspiration then filling millions of liberty-loving and patriotic spirits; and well may we call that a fair time in which noble aims and infinite hopes set all pulses beating higher, and stimulate a whole people to youthful efforts, and fill it with fresh and energetic life. Yes, there were moments of golden dreams and illusions like these. Only they should have lasted longer. It is not through their feelings, speeches, wishes, but their deeds, that nations assume their historical position and receive their historical sentence. Taine writes the last, indeed, with an incisive pen, and often with glaring colours, but essentially he gives nothing but what follows by indissoluble sequence from the facts of the Revolution.