Reports of the execution of the Hébertists penetrated the prison walls, and aroused hope that the Terror itself was to come to an end. Such hopes rapidly proved delusive. The dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety, founded by terror, rested on terror alone. Collot and Billaud had no other thought than to perpetuate their rule by continuing the system already in force. Robespierre was equally cruel, not, as in their case, from mere disregard of the amount of blood shed, but because he aimed at more, and regarded the guillotine as the most facile instrument for the attainment of his ends. He could not be satisfied with that which satisfied Billaud and Collot. Already the most prominent man on the committee, he sought the first place in the Republic, and to figure before Europe as the maintainer of virtue and the regenerator of his country. He had learned of Rousseau to regard as utterly hateful the state of society in the midst of which he had grown up with its division of classes and glaring contrasts between knowledge and ignorance, indolence and toil, luxury and squalor. Had the power been his, he would have destroyed every vestige of it by fusing all classes into one, abolishing vice and ignorance, with the extremes of wealth and poverty, and giving to all citizens similar interests, habits and pleasures. This ideal, which was Rousseau’s, was always present in Robespierre’s mind, veiling from him his own ambition; but it was vague, and he had no definite conception of the manner in which its realisation should be attempted. He was not a thinker or an organiser. Rousseau had suggested education and legislation as possible means of regeneration. To these Robespierre added nothing but the guillotine, the principle of extermination of opponents. All who stood in his light he proscribed one after another, as they appeared before him--the noble, the capitalist, the merchant, the free-trader, the atheist, the fanatic, the merciful, the moderate, the corrupt, the extortionate, and even the neutral man, until at last the people whose praises were constantly on his lips dwindled down in his mind to be no more than the Robespierrists, a few hundred ignorant and credulous but fervent supporters and admirers. ♦St. Just.♦