“That is the whole cycle; that is the great revolution! Twenty-five years in preparation, eleven years in actual practice, fourteen years in immediate consequences; fifty years all told and that is sum, substance and essence from the beginning to the end, a transfer of property! A transfer of property without compensation! A confiscation of property beyond appeal and beyond recall! There were movements also against the church, and against the family, but the transfer of property far surpassed them both in size and in significance. “That the convulsions attending the movement were more spectacular than the movement itself; that a million persons were stabbed, drowned, shot, beheaded and hunted to death within the borders of the nation; that wars were started that strewed Europe with 5,000,000 dead; that the oppression was far more ferocious than under Louis XIV, that the waste of government was arithmetically four times greater than under the most wasteful monarchy; that a whole nation was bathed in blood, bankrupted in morals, and rotted in character to the core—all of these things, hideous and appalling as they may be, distracting and absorbing as they may be, are still but as colossal incidents. _The chief movement through this sea of blood and wilderness of death was the transfer of property._” Nevertheless, Robespierre—the bloodiest man who had ever lived, the bloodiest man who ever has lived outside of Russia, and the bloodiest man who ever will live unless socialism gets control in the United States—was an idealist. He resigned the bench rather than pronounce sentence of death upon a convicted criminal. He read Rousseau’s “Social Contract” every day. He was the leader in the “uplift” movement of the age in which he lived and sought to produce Utopian conditions of “liberty, equality and fraternity” throughout France. While an Internationalist he sought to reform and transform France before extending his field of influence. But being self-willed as well as self-opinionated, at the first appearance of opposition he threw down the challenge. There was “some fight in him and he liked it.” He appealed directly to the people and condemned to the guillotine everyone who had the temerity to resist his efforts to ameliorate human conditions. While seeking everywhere for property to confiscate, and heads to guillotine, he made the most elaborate speech of his career: