It is very remarkable that he takes upon himself to know the motives of the assassins, their policy, and even what they "believed." How could this be, if he had no connection with them? He praises the murderers for not having taken as yet _all_ the lives of those who had, as he calls it, "_presented themselves_ as victims to their fury." He paints the miserable prisoners, who had been forcibly piled upon one another in the Church of the Carmelites by his faction, as _presenting themselves_ as victims to their fury,--as if death was their choice, or (allowing the idiom of his language to make this equivocal) as if they were by some accident _presented_ to the fury of their assassins: whereas he knew that the leaders of the murderers sought these pure and innocent victims in the places where they had deposited them and were sure to find them. The very selection, which he praises as a _sort of justice_ tempering their fury, proves beyond a doubt the foresight, deliberation, and method with which this massacre was made. He knew that circumstance on the very day of the commencement of the massacres, when, in all probability, he had begun this letter,--for he presented it to the Assembly on the very next. Whilst, however, he defends these acts, he is conscious that they will appear in another light to the world. He therefore acquits the executive power, that is, he acquits himself, (but only by his own assertion,) of those acts of "_vengeance mixed with a sort of justice_," as an "_excess_ which he could neither foresee nor prevent." He could not, he says, foresee these acts, when he tells us the people of Paris had sagacity so well to foresee the designs of the court on the 10th of August,--to foresee them so well as to mark the precise epoch on which they were to be executed, and to contrive to anticipate them on the very day: he could not foresee these events, though he declares in this very letter that victory _must_ bring with it some _excess_,--that "the sea roars _long_ after the tempest." So far as to his foresight. As to his disposition to prevent, if he had foreseen, the massacres of that day,--this will be judged by his care in putting a stop to the massacre then going on. This was no matter of foresight: he was in the very midst of it. He does not so much as pretend that he had used any force to put a stop to it. But if he had used any, the sanction given under his hand to a sort of justice in the murderers was enough to disarm the protecting force.