open breach with Robespierre, sought to defend themselves by combining with the threatened Montagnards. Within the Committee of Public Safety efforts were made to come to an understanding, but without success. Robespierre, aware that his enemies were conspiring against him, determined to strike first, and to secure dictatorship for himself by replacing his opponents on the two committees by partisans of his own. There appeared to be little doubt of the result. The Convention had less reason to support Billaud and Collot than himself. They had been fully as sanguinary as he; and when Collot in the Convention had once proposed to send to the scaffold seventy-three deputies of the right who had been imprisoned for signing protests against the ejection of the Girondists, he had opposed and saved their lives. In case of a struggle he had material force at his command, his opponents none. The Jacobins and the Commune were both his; the national guard, now called the armed force, was under the command of Henriot, a partisan of his own. The cannoniers of each section formed a paid force, of which every man had been selected by the Commune. Robespierre opened the attack by a long speech in the Convention, in which he complained of the traitors who spread calumnies against himself (July 26). He threatened many, but named none. It was a fatal mistake, for each man in the Convention fancied it possible that his name might be on the list of proscription. Despair gave courage to the plotters to struggle for their lives. They belonged to all parties. Some were Hébertists, others Dantonists, others independent Montagnards. Most were inferior in character to the man who attacked them. Amongst them were members of the Committee of General Security, such as the cowardly and ferocious Vadier and Amar, and the most brutal members of the Convention--Fouché, who had slaughtered at Lyons, Tallien at Bordeaux, Fréron at Marseilles, Carrier at Nantes. When, on the following day, Thermidor 10 (July 27), St. Just ascended the tribune, he was interrupted almost before he opened his lips. Shouts were raised of ‘Down, down with the tyrant!’ as Robespierre, gesticulating and menacing, strove to make himself heard above the din. The President, a Dantonist, Thuriot, incessantly rang his bell. The struggle went on for hours. ‘President of assassins’, cried Robespierre, sinking under exhaustion, ‘for the last time I demand the right of speech.’ He appealed to the Plain, the members who had been mere tools in the hands of the strongest party, and who had been mute against the Mountain since the ejection of the Girondists. But the Plain, seeing that he was no longer powerful, joined his enemies; and when it was proposed to arrest himself, his brother, Couthon, and St. Just, its members rose in a body to confirm the condemnation of the man before whom they had so long trembled.