Up to the last he advocates surgical operations. (No. for July 12, 1793, the eve of his death.) Observe what he says on the anti-revolutionaries. "To prevent them from entering into any new military body I had proposed at that time, as an indispensable prudent measure, cutting off their ears, or rather their thumbs." He likewise had his imitators. (Buchez et Roux, XXXII., 186, Session of the Convention, April 4, 1796.) Deputies from the popular club of Cette "regret that they had not followed his advice and cut off three hundred thousand heads."] [Footnote 3143: Danton never wrote or printed a speech. "I am no writer," he says. (Garat, Memoires, 31.)] [Footnote 3144: Garat, "Memoires," III.: "Danton had given no serious study to those philosophers who, for a century past, had detected the principles of social art in human nature. He had not sought in his own organization for the vast and simple combinations which a great empire demands. He had that instinct for the grand which constitutes genius and that silent circumspection which constitutes judgment."] [Footnote 3145: Garat, ibid., 311, 312.] [Footnote 3146: The head of a State may be considered in the same light as the superintendent of an asylum for the sick, the demented and the infirm. In the government of his asylum he undoubtedly does well to consult the moralist and the physiologist; but, before following out their instructions he must remember that in his asylum its inmates, including the keepers and himself, are more or less ill, demented or infirm.] [Footnote 3147: De Sybel: "Histoire de l'Europe pendant la Revolution Française," (Dosquet's translation from the German) II., 303. "It can now be stated that it was the active operations of Danton and the first committee of Public Safety which divided the coalition and gave the Republic the power of opposing Europe... We shall soon see, on the contrary, that the measures of the "Mountain" party, far from hastening the armaments, hindered them."] [Footnote 3148: Ibid., I., 558, 562, 585. (The intermediaries were Westermann and Dumouriez.)] [Footnote 3149: 2 Ibid., II., 28, 290, 291, 293.] [Footnote 3150: Buchez et Roux, XXV., 445. (Session of April 13, 1793.)]