Behind Robespierre was St. Just, a young man a little over twenty, fanatic, self-confident and intolerant. In thought he was more audacious than Robespierre, and his conceptions were more definite. He was probably the most thorough-going disciple of Rousseau in France. Like his master, he based his conceptions of what the government of a great state ought to be on the institutions of the petty republics of antiquity, and of all those republics the one which he selected for imitation was, strangely enough, that of aristocratic Sparta. But it was the despotism of Sparta, not its aristocracy, which he admired. By means of Spartan institutions he thought to remould the habits and customs of his countrymen. All boys were to be brought up together in common schools. Every man was to marry, and every man to work. Every man was to have friends, and to make every year a public declaration of their names in the temple of the Supreme Being. If he committed a crime, his friends were to be banished from the Republic. In short, by aid of laws and state institutions of this character, St. Just believed it possible to give to the French people simple, frugal, and industrious habits. Circumstances, he said, were of no importance, except to men who fear death. Meanwhile, until the necessary institutions should be established and the habits and beliefs of his countrymen transformed, St. Just, like Robespierre, fell back on the guillotine in order to get rid of those who stood in the way of the accomplishment of his ideal. Until men were virtuous in his sense of the word, the Republic could rest upon terror alone. What, asked this young, fanatical, and unscrupulous theorist, would those have who reject alike as principles of government virtue and terror? Besides fanaticism and love of power, there existed a material motive for the continuance of the Terror. Resources were secured for the service of the State. As soon as a person was imprisoned his capital was sequestered and his revenue confiscated. When he was condemned to die, the capital itself was confiscated. But the promise held out before the arrest of the Hébertists, that provision should be made for the indigent out of sequestered property, was never carried into effect. Further, purchasers of state lands lost their lives by scores, and thus national property came a second time into the market as security for the paper money. Cynical words ascribed to Barère exactly expressed the satisfaction felt by many at these financial results of the guillotine. ‘We coin money,’ he was reported to have said, ‘on the Place de la Révolution.’