of the Supreme Being, in place of leading to a revival of principles of humanity, had been followed by a sharpening of the Terror. On the pretext of maintaining public order, the Catholic worship remained prohibited. The tyranny weighed down the oppressors along with the oppressed. Men were imprisoned and sent to the scaffold indifferently for acts of mercy, knavery, or extravagance. The denouncer of to-day was the denounced of to-morrow. Municipalities and administrative bodies trembled before clubs and revolutionary committees; these, in turn, before deputies in mission; deputies in mission before the two committees; and the members of the committees before one another. However high a man’s place in the revolutionary hierarchy, he could not shelter his best friends or nearest relatives without risking his own head. ♦Insurrection of Thermidor 10.♦ Violent discords broke out within the Committee of Public Safety. Robespierre’s efforts to raise himself excited the indignation of his colleagues; for the more powerful he became, the more insecure was the tenure on which their own lives rested. On the other hand, Robespierre was nervous, envious, and suspicious, and the higher he rose the more eager he became to shed the blood of his enemies, and of those who stood in the way of his rising higher still. The Montagnards hated him. Those who had walked behind him at the feast of the Supreme Being had not been able to restrain themselves from uttering insulting words. ‘Formerly he was master’, one was heard to say, ‘and now he must be God as well.’ Some, aware that they were objects of his special enmity, were plotting obscurely against him. Of the twelve members of the Committee of General Security all but two were his enemies. Supported by Couthon and St. Just, Robespierre proposed in the Committee of Public Safety a proscription of several members of the Mountain and of the Committee of General Security. Billaud and Collot opposed. Consent would have been suicidal, since they were called on to sacrifice their own supporters. The cowardly Barère hesitated which side to join. One member of the Committee of Public Safety had been guillotined with the Dantonists. The remaining five, though it was not their desire to shed blood, were accustomed to give their signatures without questioning on the demand of the governing members, and thus incurred responsibility for all that took place. They had more in common with Robespierre than with Collot, since they too cared for order as well as power; but, while submitting to his ascendancy, they loathed and despised him. Carnot, who was one of these, and whose success at the head of the war administration made Robespierre envious, and who could not conceal his antipathy for Robespierre and St. Just, was marked out for destruction. The threatened members of the Committee of General Security, afraid that Billaud and Collot would sacrifice them sooner than come to an