It is difficult to believe that Carnot and Lindet, or even Robespierre and St. Just, could have cordially approved of such a system. But that they sanctioned it is clear. Some, like Carnot, shut their eyes, feeling that it was no use to interfere. Others, like St. Just and Robespierre, took refuge in their resolutely blind fanaticism. 'Patriots' could not do wrong, and if their own friends brought them proof to the contrary, they refused, except in the grossest cases, to listen or believe. They had to use such weapons as they could find, and they comforted their consciences with general declarations. 'The Jacobins,' cried Collot d'Herbois, 'are compassionate, humane and generous. These virtues, however, they reserve for patriots who are their brethren, and not for aristocrats.' Most of them believed the Terror to be needed. 'It is necessary,' said Billaud, 'that the people should be created anew.' Even Jean Bon St. André insisted that, in order to establish the ideal Republic, half the population of France must be destroyed. 'Our purpose,' Robespierre steadily protested, 'is to substitute morality for egotism, honesty for honour, principles for usages, ... the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion, ... nobleness for vanity, love of glory for the love of gain,' but in order to fulfil their virtuous purpose, the Terrorists called in the help of the depraved. These considerations may serve to explain the catastrophe of the leaders of the Terror. So far as their experiments were honest and high-motived, they will always be of interest to the world. But even as reformers their failure was complete. The effects of their desperate action were disastrous. Their methods utterly discredited their cause, and occasioned an infinite amount of suffering to France. And while in part, no doubt, they failed through ignorance, they failed chiefly because so many of them were bad men. In the end, the Terrorists did little materially or morally to raise the level of life, little to advance the equality which they longed for, and to which men march through order, not through crime. Of all their work, strenuous and heroic as it often was, only one part, the war, entirely prospered. For under the Terror Frenchmen threw into the war the irresistible enthusiasm which the Revolution had created, and which they could no longer feel for politics at home. The Terror was never sanctioned by France, and it never will receive the sanction of posterity. To assume that it was necessary is only one among the many sophisms which weak and well-intentioned men advance for palliating wrong. Even the excuse of national peril was wanting, for the ease with which the Jacobins in Paris subdued their enemies in the summer of 1793, shows how powerful their position was, and in the winter of that year all serious danger of invasion disappeared. The Terror was necessary to keep the Terrorists in power, and to enable them to carry out their views.