The debates of the Convention are violent and acrimonious.  Robespierre has been accused of aspiring to the Dictatorship, and his defence was by no means calculated to exonerate him from the charge.  All the chiefs reproach each other with being the authors of the late massacres, and each succeeds better in fixing the imputation on his neighbour, than in removing it from himself.  General reprobation, personal invectives, and long speeches, are not wanting; but every thing which tends to examination and enquiry is treated with much more delicacy and composure:  so that I fear these first legislators of the republic must, for the present, be content with the reputation they have assigned each other, and rank amongst those who have all the guilt, but want the courage, of assassins.

I subjoin an extract from a newspaper, which has lately appeared.*

     Extract from _The Courier de l’Egalite,_ November, 1792: 

     “There are discontented people who still venture to obtrude their
     sentiments on the public.  One of them, in a public print, thus
     expresses himself—­

’I assert, that the newspapers are sold and devoted to falsehood.  At this price they purchase the liberty of appearing; and the exclusive privilege they enjoy, as well as the contradictory and lying assertions they all contain, prove the truth of what I advance.  They are all preachers of liberty, yet never was liberty so shamefully outraged—­of respect for property, and property was at no time so little held sacred—­of personal security, yet when were there committed so many massacres? and, at the very moment I am writing, new ones are premeditated.  They call vehemently for submission, and obedience to the laws, but the laws had never less influence; and while our compliance with such as we are even ignorant of is exacted, it is accounted a crime to execute those in force.  Every municipality has its own arbitrary code—­every battalion, every private soldier, exercises a sovereignty, a most absolute despotism; and yet the Gazettes do not cease to boast the excellence of such a government.  They have, one and all, attributed the massacres of the tenth of August and the second of September, and the days following each, to a popular fermentation.  The monsters! they have been careful not to tell us, that each of these horrid scenes (at the prisons, at La Force, at the Abbaye, &c. &c.) was presided by municipal officers in their scarfs, who pointed out the victims, and gave the signal for the assassination.  It was (continue the Journals) the error of an irritated people—­and yet their magistrates were at the head of it:  it was a momentary error; yet this error of a moment continued during six whole days of the coolest reflection—­it was only at the close of the seventh that Petion made his appearance, and affected to persuade the people to desist.  The assassins left off only from fatigue, and at this moment they are preparing