Some time previous to the deposition of the King, Commissioners were sent to suppress these disorders; and though I doubt not but all possible means were taken to conciliate, I can easily believe, that neither the King nor his Ministers might be desirous of subduing by force a people who erred only from piety or loyalty.  What effect this system of indulgence might have produced cannot now be decided; because the subsequent overthrow of the monarchy, and the massacre or banishment of the priests, must have totally alienated their minds, and precluded all hope of reconcilement.—­Disaffection, therefore, continued to increase, and the Brissotines are suspected of having rather fostered than repressed these intestine commotions,* for the same purpose which induced them to provoke the war with England, and to extend that of the Continent.

     * Le Brun, one of the Brissotin Ministers, concealed the progress of
     this war for six months before he thought fit to report it to the
     Convention.

—­It is impossible to assign a good motive to any act of this literary intriguer.

—­Perhaps, while they determined to establish their faction by “braving all Europe,” they might think it equally politic to perplex and overawe Paris by a near and dangerous enemy, which would render their continuance in power necessary, or whom they might join, if expelled from it.*

* This last reason might afterwards have given way to their apprehensions, and the Brissotins have preferred the creation of new civil wars, to a confidence in the royalists.  These men, who condemned the King for a supposed intention of defending an authority transmitted to him through whole ages, and recently sanctioned by the voice of the people, did not scruple to excite a civil war in defence of their six months’ sovereignty over a republic, proclaimed by a ferocious comedian, and certainly without the assent of the nation.  Had the ill-fated Monarch dared thus to trifle with the lives of his subjects, he might have saved France and himself from ruin.

When men gratify their ambition by means so sanguinary and atrocious as those resorted to by the Brissotines, we are authorized in concluding they will not be more scrupulous in the use or preservation of power, than they were in attaining it; and we can have no doubt but that the fomenting or suppressing the progress of civil discord, was, with them, a mere question of expediency.

The decree which took place in March, 1793, for raising three hundred thousand men in the departments, changed the partial insurrections of La Vendee to an open and connected rebellion; and every where the young people refused going, and joined in preference the standard of revolt.  In the beginning of the summer, the brigands* (as they were called) grew so numerous, that the government, now in the hands of Robespierre and his party, began to take serious measures to combat them.