It is very questionable, nowadays, whether such a press prosecution would have been inaugurated, or, if so, whether it would have been successful, yet there was some pretty hard hitting. “And now this tiger, who dares to call himself the founder, or the regenerator, of France, enjoys the fruit of your labours, as spoil taken from the enemy. This man, sole master in the midst of those who surround him, has ordained lists of proscription, and put in execution, banishment without sentence, by means of which there are punishments for the French who have not yet seen the light. Proscribed families give birth to children, oppressed before they are born; their misery has commenced before their life. His wickedness increases every day.” The Attorney General gave many similar passages, which it would be too tedious to reproduce, winding up with the following quotation: “‘Kings are at his feet, begging his favour. He is desired to secure the supreme authority in his hands. The French, nay, Kings themselves, hasten to congratulate him, and would take the oath to him like subjects. He is proclaimed Chief Consul for life. As for me, far from envying his lot, let him name, I consent to it, his worthy successor. Carried on the shield, let him be elected Emperor! Finally (and Romulus recalls the thing to mind), I wish, on the morrow, he may have his apotheosis. Amen.’ Now, gentlemen, he says, Romulus suggests that idea. The fate that is ascribed to him is well known to all of us—according to ancient history, he was assassinated.” Peltier’s counsel, a Mr. Mackintosh, defended him very ably, asking pertinently: “When Robespierre presided over the Committee of Public Safety, was not an Englishman to canvass his measures? Supposing we had then been at peace with France, would the Attorney General have filed an information against any one who had expressed due abhorrence of the furies of that sanguinary monster? When Marat demanded 250,000 heads in the Convention, must we have contemplated that request without speaking of it in the terms it provoked? When Carrier placed five hundred children in a square at Lyons, to fall by the musketry of the soldiery, and from their size the balls passed over them, the little innocents flew to the knees of the soldiery for protection, when they were butchered by the bayonet! In relating this event, must man restrain his just indignation, and stifle the expression of indignant horror such a dreadful massacre must excite? Would the Attorney General in his information state, that when Maximilian Robespierre was first magistrate of France, as President of the Committee of Public Safety, that those who spoke of him as his crimes deserved, did it with a wicked and malignant intention to defame and vilify him....