As the situation grew more perilous, legislation assumed an increasingly harsh and tyrannical character. In March, at the very time when the retreat of Dumouriez from Belgium offered an opportunity to the allies of attempting a march on Paris, a dangerous insurrection, excited by the forced recruitment, broke out amongst the peasants of La Vendée. The Convention, enraged against its adversaries, and frightened at the unexpected danger, struck at random, regardless of the fact that it was crushing the innocent along with the guilty. Those who instigated resistance to the recruitment of the army were punished by death. Priests, subject to banishment, who had remained in the country, were to be transported to French Guiana. Banished priests who returned were to be executed within twenty-four hours. The Legislative Assembly had made it a crime to quit the country, and had confiscated the property of the emigrants. The Convention laid a firmer grip on their property by banishing them for ever from the republic, and by forbidding them to return under penalty of death. Although many of the exiles had had no intention of fighting against their country, but had merely quitted France because their lives were in danger, no exceptions were made, and no account taken of sex or circumstance. ♦Policy of the Mountain.♦ In the midst of internal strife and preparation for defence the Convention was engaged on the task of framing a new constitution. When abstract questions were under discussion but little difference of view arose. In fact, the contention between the two parties did not concern principles, but their immediate application. The Girondists were prepared, without heed of circumstances, to carry into action principles of decentralisation, popular election, and free trade, and contended that the republic must rest upon the political virtue and public spirit of the mass of the population. The Montagnards regarded facts only. They recognised that active support to the republic was to be looked for from the mob alone; that attempts to enforce principles of free trade against the will of their own supporters must lead to the overthrow of the Convention; that under the circumstances popular election was a farce, and that amid the strife of parties and factions decentralisation meant, as the experience of the past two years had shown, that France would be without an effective Government at a time when a powerful coalition was formed against her. A far lower motive impelled them in the same direction. The safety of their country appeared to them dependent on the triumph of their own party, and to secure this they were prepared to act in the teeth of their theoretical opinions. They denied liberty to the press. They sacrificed freedom of trade to the clamours of the populace. They not only maintained the right of Paris to act for the whole of France, but, in order the more effectually to secure submission, sought by the agency of clubs