"Citizen, it is true there are great criminals in the Abbey; but all the prisoners are not guilty in the same degree. Are there not some imprisoned merely as suspects? Are you sure that among them there are none innocent? And, with such doubt on your mind, would you kill all? No, citizen, such a crime would defile the Revolution!" My intervention seemed for a moment to have recalled the throng to less barbarous sentiments. But just at that instant there arrived a panting workman, who jumped on a curbstone, exclaiming: "Citizens--I come from the Assembly--I bring you serious news!" "Silence!--Let us listen!" "When the committee-men of the commune read their decrees to the Assembly, Vergniaud cried out: 'I thank Paris for its courage and energy; now one may say the country is saved!' He called Longwy, which had surrendered to the Prussians, a city of cowards. Hearing the refrain of the Marseillaise he said 'There is enough singing of Liberty--we must defend it. It is no longer Kings of bronze that must be torn down--it is the despots of Europe! Down with the Kings!' And he, Vergniaud, closed his address to the Assembly with these words: 'I demand that the Assembly, at this moment more a military body than a legislative, send at once, and every day hereafter, twelve delegates to the entrenched camp in the Field of Mars, not with empty discourses to exhort the citizens to work, but to ply the pick-ax with their own hands. The time is past for orating. We must dig the graves of our enemies. Our enemies are both in front of and behind us, citizens; in front of us the Prussians, behind us the royalists, the priests, their lay communicants, and the brigands in the prisons!'" And the workman proceeded with his report of the occurrences in the Assembly: "When Vergniaud left the platform, Roland, the Minister of the Interior, asked the floor to inform the Assembly of some very important matters. 'The Vendee,' he said, 'spurred on by the dissident clergy, has risen in several places, and patriots have been massacred. One portion of the south, under the instigation of the priests and the former nobles, is the breeding-ground of a vast conspiracy, with the Count of Saillant at its head. He has declared himself "the lieutenant-general of the army of the Princes."'" Before the crowd had recovered from the stupefaction into which it was thrown by these words the speaker continued: