One characteristic of the party was the license which marked their speech and conduct. Coarseness of language was not uncommon among Jacobin politicians, and even the greatest of them, like Danton, shared it. In many cases the habit was not natural, but was deliberately affected for a political purpose, and cultivated as a sign of democracy and in order to win popularity with the mob. It was in men like Hébert and his allies that this contemptible fashion reached its climax. Hébert made his political reputation by it. His journal, the _Père Duchesne_, which raised him to notoriety and power, was started with the express intention of appealing to the obscene tastes of the multitude, and its scandalous impurity has probably never been surpassed. Of what calibre must the men have been who were driven to such methods of acquiring fame? Their language, however, would have mattered little, had it not been so often reflected in their conduct, and had they not possessed the power to abolish, with the aid of the guillotine, all those laws and decorums by which society protects itself. Hébert had no lack of imitators among the men whom the Terror raised to power. Guffroy, a member of the Committee of General Security, started a paper in the same style. Javogues and Dartigoyte, Vacheron, Laplanche and others preached and adopted in the departments the morality of Père Duchesne, and those below them in the hierarchy of the Terror rivalled or exceeded the example of their chiefs. Nor can one overlook the ferocity which so many Terrorists displayed. The records of despotism contain few things which surpass the sanguinary rigour of Collot d'Herbois, Fréron and Lebon, the iniquities permitted by Ronsin, the hero of the Revolutionary Army, and by Fouquier-Tinville, the hero of the Revolutionary Tribunal, the cynical cruelty of a Fouché watching a massacre from a window, lorgnette in hand, the savagery of a Carrier, who declared that he had never laughed so much in his life as he did at the contortions of his victims, the pitiless fanaticism of a Robespierre, who, after ten months of the Terror, insisted on fresh legislation for simplifying trials and facilitating death, the terrible ingenuity of a Vadier, who invented the idea of getting up conspiracies in the prisons so as to furnish more victims for the scaffold, or the barbarity of a Government which, while endorsing this iniquitous device, proposed to shoot all its prisoners of war, and would have done so, had not its own officers refused to carry the order out.