them!" The young conservative was a doomed man already.

He goes on to say that such a deplorable state of things must be owing to the machinations of some public enemies. Who are these enemies? Not the Austrians, fatigued and exhausted by their own wars; nor the English, "that nation about which the Parisians talk so much and know so little;"* nor yet the emigrants. These last have been influenced by fear, prejudice and ignorance. The surest way to bring them back and make them good citizens is to present such a spectacle of order and tranquillity as will show them that their fears and prejudices are unfounded. But even admitting their hostility, what can such a faction accomplish if the State is united? And this leads to the first conclusion, that the real public enemies are those causes which prevent the re-establishment of public tranquillity. Now what are these causes? "Everything that has been done in this revolution, good or bad, is owing to writings: in them, perhaps, then, we shall find the source of the evils that threaten us.' And, accordingly, he proceeds to show that these public enemies are the encouragers and apologists of popu lar excesses. After a hasty summary of these excesses, he exclaims, with a natural and virtuous indignation-" And to think that there are writers blood-thirsty or cowardly enough to come forward as the protectors and excusers of these murders! That they dare to abet them! That they dare to point out this and that victim! That they have the audacity to give the name of popular justice to these horrible violations of all justice and all law! To be sure, the power of hanging, like all other powers, is ultimately referable to the people, but it is a frightful thing, if this is the only power which they are not willing to exercise by their representatives."

Then follow several pages of just and powerful invective against "those people to whom all law is burdensome, all restraint insupportable, all rule odious; people for whom an honest life is the most oppressive of yokes! They hated the old government, not because it was bad, but because it was a government; they will hate the new; they will hate all, whatever

* Equally true this, at the present day.

be their nature." How accurately Chénier foresaw what would be the consequence of giving in to these people may be seen from the following extract :—

"Now, as I was saying, is it not evident that, on the one hand, the workmen and day-laborers steady work, abandoning themselves to this of every class, who only live by constant and turbulent indolence, will no longer be able to gain a subsistence, and before long, stimulated by hunger, and the rage which hunger inspires, will only think of seeking for money wherever they imagine it may be found? On the other hand, it is hardly necessary to say that the farms and workshops thus abandoned will cease to be capable of supplying that income of individuals which alone makes the public income. No more taxes then; consequently no more public service; consequently the upper classes reduced to misery and despair; the army disbanded and pillaging the country; the infamy of a national bankruptcy accomplished and declared; the citizens all in arms against each other. No more taxes; consequently no more government; the National Assembly obliged to abandon its task, and put to flight; universal slaughter and conflagration; provinces, towns, and individuals mutually accusing one another of their common disasters; France torn to pieces by the convulsions of this incendiary anarchy.'

There was no want of respectable peralarmists. Chénier has a word for these: sons to laugh at these alarms and pity the

"I should like these persons, for our entire satisfaction, to deign to take pen in hand, and prove that these fermentations, these tempests, these continued pangs, have not the tendency which I attributed to them; that they do not produce a spirit of insubordination and want of discipline; or, if they please, that this spirit is not the most formidable enemy of law and liberty. I should like them also to show us what will become of France, if the bulk of the French people, wearied of their own indiscretions and the anarchy resulting from them, wearied of never arriving at the goal which they have themselves continually put further off, should in disgust of liberty, and, as the remembrance come to believe that liberty is only to be found of former evils is readily effaced, should end by regretting their old yoke of quiet degradation."

He proceeds to draw an important distinction:

"These same persons are never tired of repeating to us that things are preserved by the same means which have acquired them. If by

this they mean that courage, activity and union | are as necessary to preserve liberty as to win it, nothing is more incontrovertible or more irrelevant; but if they understand that in both cases

obedience to the caprices of despots is called public order, under a free constitution founded on the national sovereignty, public order is the only safeguard of persons and property, the only support of the constitution.

to rebuild on extensive and durable foundations, when we must make after having unmade, then our courage should be the very reverse of what it was at first. It should be calm, prudent and deliberate; it should manifest itself only in wisdom, tenacity and patience; it should fear to resemble those torrents which ravage without fertilizing. Hence it follows that the means which accomplished the Revolution, if they continue to be employed without addition or qualification, can only destroy its efficiency by hindering the constitution from being established. Hence again it follows that those wild pamphleteers, those unruly demagogues, who, enemies, as we have seen, of all government and all restraint, thundered against old abuses at the beginning of the Revolution, were then right enough, for they found themselves for the moment united with all honest men in proclaiming the truths which have made us free; but that now they ought not to claim our confidence as a debt, or accuse our want of attention as a want of gratitude, while in using the same expressions and the same declamations against an absolutely new order of things, they are preaching an entirely different doctrine,

which would conduct us to a different end."

What remedies and safeguards are to be adopted? Popular errors are apt to arise from ignorance, rather than deliberate wickedness. The real principles of civil liberty must be carefully inculcated. Here are some of the things which every citizen ought to know and feel:

"That there can be no happiness and freedom in society without government and public order.

"That there can be no private wealth, unless the public revenue, or in other words, the public wealth, is secure.

"That the public wealth cannot be secure without public order.

"That, while in despotic states a blind

*An application of the same principle explains what has puzzled some good men-how Protestants may consistently join with skeptics in opposing the abuses of the Romish Church, where Romanism is the prevailing religion.

yoke of the law―a yoke always light when all bear it equally.

"That every respectable nation respects itself.

"That every nation which respects itself respects its own laws and magistrates. "That there is no liberty without law.

"That there is no law if one part of society, be it the majority or not, can forcibly assail and attempt to overthrow the former general wish which has made a law, without waiting for the times and observing the forms indicated by the constitution.

That, as M. de Condorcet has very well shown in a late publication, when the constitution gives a legal way of reforming a law which experience has shown to be faulty, insurrection against a law is the greatest crime of which a citizen can be guilty; for he thereby dissolves society so far as in him lies, and this is the real crime of treason.

"That there is no liberty if all do not obey the law, and if any one is obliged to obey anything except the law and its agents.

"That no one ought to be arrested, searched, examined, judged, or punished, except according to law and by the agents of the law.

"That the law is only applicable to actions, and that all inquisitions upon opinions and thoughts are no less violations of liberty when exercised in the name of the people, than when exercised in the name of tyrants."

If these brief sentences had been written at the present day; if they had appeared, for instance, in an article of the Courier and Enquirer, or our own Review, against the anti-renters, while it could not be denied that they expressed sound political views in a bold and forcible manner, it might be said that they contained nothing very striking or remarkable, but were only a succinct and vigorous statement of what all honest and sane men believed.

But composed, as they were, at a period when of the two great experiments whence we derive most of our political experience, the one was just beginning and the other had not had time to work; a period when the majority of reformers and philosophers thought with Jefferson, that "the old system of government had been tried long enough," and the only escape from it was to rush into the opposite extreme of no government at all except the temporary will of an occasional majority, they denote uncommon sagacity and foresight, and prove that Chénier had the head of a statesman no less than the heart of a patriot. Most particularly worthy of notice is the clearness of his financial views, and the accuracy with which he traced the connection between private and public wealth. It was then a favorite delusion, that the nation might be bankrupt without affecting the fortunes of individuals. The great hero and apostle of democratic despotism who rose out of the Revolution, fell into the contrary error of supposing that the public treasury might continue to be recruited by the appropriation of private capital, not seeing that, to use an ancient but apposite illustration, he was thus killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. It was reserved for a still more modern democracy to invent a still wiser and honester financial expedient-that of repudiating the obligations, while they enjoy the acquisitions, of past generations.

The Avis au Francais made a great sensation, which was not confined to France. Two circumstances will show the extent and force of its influence. The Polish king Stanislaus Augustus, caused it to be translated into his language, and sent a token of his esteem to the author, who returned a letter of thanks: of course, the friends of the Constitution were still more amiably disposed to him, after this royal correspondence. And Condorcet, finding that he could no longer take the lead in the Society of 1789, broke up that association so far as lay in his power, and went straight over to the Jacobins. Chenier's reputation emboldened him to present himself in the following year, (1791,) as a candidate for the assembly; but, as might have been predicted of a man so independent and so much beyond his age, he was unsuccessful.

After this he continued to attack and

| expose the Jacobins in the Journal de Paris, a paper professedly neutral, and publishing communications on any side as paid advertisements, but edited by men of a conservative leaning. The Jacobins were not slow to answer their bold assailant. They set upon him his own brother, Maril Joseph, the youngest of the four, who had by some means been inveigled into their ranks. The discussion, which lasted several months and was only broken off at the urgent entreaties of the rest of the family, displayed at the outset, but did not long preserve, the moderation and delicacy demanded by the uncommon position of the parties. The two brothers all but O'Connellized each other. They applied to each other's writings the epithet of infamous, then a pet word in the vocabulary of the French journalists, and more usually merited than such pet words generally are. How Joseph Chenier came to take sides with the Jacobins, is not perfectly clear. It seems probable that they flattered his vanity, and made him half believe that his brother's opposi tion was attributable to envy and jealousy. For when most angry with Andre, his bitterest taunt is to remind him of the election for deputies. A very young man among Democrats may be pardoned for supposing that office and honor are synonymous, and not reflecting that where merit is no longer the test of advancement, the correlative mentioned by Sallust is unavoidable.*

If, however, the leading Jacobins supposed, that by getting up this personal issue they had succeeded in diverting or weakening Andre Chenier's attacks upon them, they were very much mistaken. In the winter of 1792, an event occurred, which, by eminently exposing them to his ridicule, specially marked him out for their vengeance. Two years before, a Swiss regiment had been condemned to the galleys for mutiny. Their offences were gross and unequivocal: they had refused to swear to the Constitution, plundered the regimental chest, and fired upon the National Guard. But General Bouillé, against whom they then revolted, had now proved a traitor to

"Verum ex his magistratus et imperia, postremo omnis cura rerum publicarum minime mihi hac tempestate capiunda videntur quoniam neque virtuti honos datur, neque illi quibus per fraudem is fuit, utique tuti aut eo magis honesti sunt."-Sallust, Bell. Jug., Cap. 3.

the popular cause. In a fit of childish spite against him, the Swiss were pardoned; on motion of Collot d'Herbois, the amnesty was changed into a triumph; a fête was given to the liberated culprits, and Pétion, as mayor of Paris, presided at it. The intense absurdity of the affair threw into the shade its injustice and danger; and Chenier was not the man to let any of this absurdity be lost. He satirized and ridiculed the Jacobins in prose and verse. He sketched a plan for the new ovation :—

The Romans used to engrave on brass the names of those generals to whom they granted a triumph, and their titles to so great an honor. I suppose the city of Paris will follow this example, and the happy witnesses of the triumphal entry will read inscribed on the car of vic

tory:

6

For having revolted with arms in their hands, and replied to the reading of the National Assembly's decree which recalled them to their duty, that they persisted in their revolt;' "For having been declared guilty of high treason by a decree of the National Assembly, Aug. 16, 1790;

666

"For having plundered the regimental chest; For having spoken these memorable words: We are not Frenchmen; we are Swiss; we must have money;

666

For having fired upon the National Guards of Metz and other places, who marched to Nancy in accordance with the decrees of the National Assembly,'

And he proceeds, with unanswerable irony:

"General Bouillé deceived all France and its representatives. None but these Swiss soldiers penetrated his bad designs. They saw that he would take the first opportunity to become a perjured traitor. Accordingly they took up arms against him, and made sure of the regimental chest, for fear this money, falling into his less patriotic hands, should serve the purposes of the counter-revolutionists.

"Since General Bouillé has shown himself a cowardly and treacherous enemy of his country, it is clear that those who fired on him, and on the French citizens marching under his orders by virtue of a decree of the National Assembly, cannot but be excellent patriots.

"In every criminal case there can be but one culpable party. For example, when a murdered man is proved to have been a rogue, it is evident that his murderer must be an honest man."

The only reply Collot d'Herbois and his myrmidons could make, was to charge Chénier with being hired by the Court,

and to threaten him with assassination-two excellent radical arguments.

Chénier had already drawn a portrait of the Jacobin Club, too faithful not to provoke their fiercest indignation. This sketch was published in the supplement to the Journal de Paris, February 26, 1792, just a month before the letter from which we have been quoting :

"There exists in the midst of Paris a numerous association, holding frequent meetings, open to all who are, or pretend to be, patriots, always governed by leaders visible or invisible, who are continually changing and mutually destroying one another, but who have always the same object-the supreme power; and the same intention-to get that power by whatever means. This society, formed at a moment when liberal principles, though sure to triumph, were not yet completely established, necessarily attracted a great number of citizens who were filled with alarm and warmly attached to the good cause. Many of these had more zeal than knowledge. With them glided in many hypocrites; so did many people who were in debt, without industry, poor through their own indolence, and seeing something to hope for in any change. Many wise and just men who know that in a well regulated State all the citizens do not attend to public affairs, while all ought to attend to their private affairs, have since retired from it; whence it follows that this association must be chiefly composed of some skilful players, who arrange the cards and profit by them, of some subordinate intriguers with whom an habitual eagerness for mischief takes the place of talent, and a large number of idlers, honest, but ignorant and short-sighted, incapable of any bad intention themselves, but very capable of forwarding the bad intentions of others without knowing it.

"This society has generated an infinity of others; towns, boroughs, and villages are full of them. They are almost all under the orders of the parent society, with which they keep up a most active correspondence. It is a body in Paris and the head of a larger body extending of Rome plant the faith, and govern the world over France. In the same way did the Church by its congregations of monks.

years ago by men of great popularity, who saw "This system was imagined and expected two very well that it was a means of increasing their power and preserving their popularity, but did not see how perilous an instrument it was. So long as they ruled these societies, all the errors there committed met their warmest

approbation; but since they have been blown up by this mine of their own kindling, they detest the excesses which are no longer to their profit, and, talking more truth without possess

ing more wisdom, combine with honest men in cursing their old master-piece.

"The audience before which these societies deliberate, constitutes their strength; and when one considers that men of business do not neglect their affairs to listen at the debates of a club, and that men of intelligence prefer the silence of the closet, or the peaceable conversation, to the tumult and clamors of these noisy crowds, it is easy to see what must be the ordinary composition of the audience, and further, what sort of language is the best recommendation to them. One simple fallacy is all-sufficient the constitution being founded on that eternal truth, the sovereignty of the people, it is only necessary to persuade the listeners at the club that they are the people.

"Lecturers and journal-mongers have generally adopted this definition. Some hundred vagabonds collected in a garden or at a play, or some gangs of robbers and shop-lifters, are impudently denominated the people; and never did the most wanton despot receive from the most eagre courtier adoration so vile and disgusting, as the base flattery with which two or three thousand usurpers of the national sovereignty are every day intoxicated-thanks to the writers and speakers of these societies!

"As the semblance of patriotism is the only profitable virtue, some men who have been stigmatized by their disgraceful lives run to the club to get a reputation for patriotism, by the violence of their discourses, founding on their riotous declamations, and the passions of the multitude, oblivion of the past and hope for the future, and redeeming themselves from disgrace by impudence. At the clubs are daily proclaimed, sentiments and even principles which threaten the fortunes and the property of all. Under the names of forestalling and monopoly, industry aud commerce are represented as crimes. Every rich man passes for a public enemy. Neither honor nor reputation is spared; odious suspicions and unbridled slander are called liberty of opinion. He who demands proof of an accusation, is a suspected man, an enemy of the people. At the clubs, every absurdity is admired, if it be only murderous every falsehood cherished, if it be only atrocious. * *Sometimes, indeed, guilty parties are assailed, but they are assailed with a violence, a ferocity, and an unfairness that make them appear innocent.'

*

*

About the same time, (its exact date and the medium of its publication are uncertain,) Chénier wrote The Altars of Fear, a sort of last appeal to the lovers of good order. Its title alludes to the practice of the ancients, who made fear a divinity, and erected altars to him.

"To be sure, we have not yet imitated them

to the letter, but, as in all ages profoundly religious men have observed that the heart is the true altar where the Deity chooses to be honored, and that internal adoration is a thousand times more valuable than all the pomp of a magnificent worship intrusted to a small number of persons, and confined to certain places by express consecration, we may say that fear had never more truly altars erected to it, than now in Paris; that it was never honored with a more general worship; that this whole city is its temple; that all respectable people have become its pontiffs, offering to it the daily sacrifice of their opinions and their conscience."

The mob commit excesses; personal privacy and personal liberty are invaded; the respectable people say nothing against it or about it, "for fear of being called aristocrats.”

"The simple sound of this word aristocrat stupefies the public man, and attacks the very principle of motion in him. He wishes the success of the good, with all his heart; he is making zealous exertions that way, and would sacrifice all his fortune to it; in the midst of his action, let him hear those four fatal syllables pronounced against him, and he trembles, he grows pale, the sword of the law falls from his grasp. Now it is clear enough, that Cicero will never be anything better than an aristocrat, to take Clodius or Cataline's word for it: if, then, Cicero is afraid, what will become of us ?"

It must be plead, however, in excuse for these respectable people who said nothing for fear of being called aristocrats, that they had pretty urgent motives for silence. To be unpopular at that day, was to have your head cut off: the terms were convertible. There are many among us, to whom such reproaches are infinitely more applicable, men who will not lift up their voices against some popular abuse or injustice or prejudice, for fear of being called federalist or aristocrat; although, thank God! to call a man federalist or aristocrat neither knocks him on the head nor even takes a cent out of his pocket. And when we hear a man complaining of the tyranny of the majority and popular intimidation because his independent conduct has caused his fellow-townsmen to refuse him their voices at an election, or

made some honest editor afraid to publish his communications, we would just refer him to Chenier, who was putting his neck under the axe every time he took pen in hand.

The momentous tenth of August came,