obey.  We will take no Prisoners then, say the Soldiers of Liberty; they shall all be ‘Deserters’ that we take. (See Dampmartin, Evenemens, ii. 213-30.) It is a frantic order; and attended with inconvenience.  For surely, if you give no quarter, the plain issue is that you will get none; and so the business become as broad as it was long.—­Our ’recruitment of Three Hundred Thousand men,’ which was the decreed force for this year, is like to have work enough laid to its hand.

So many enemies come wending on; penetrating through throats of Mountains, steering over the salt sea; towards all points of our territory; rattling chains at us.  Nay worst of all:  there is an enemy within our own territory itself.  In the early days of March, the Nantes Postbags do not arrive; there arrive only instead of them Conjecture, Apprehension, bodeful wind of Rumour.  The bodefullest proves true!  Those fanatic Peoples of La Vendee will no longer keep under:  their fire of insurrection, heretofore dissipated with difficulty, blazes out anew, after the King’s Death, as a wide conflagration; not riot, but civil war.  Your Cathelineaus, your Stofflets, Charettes, are other men than was thought:  behold how their Peasants, in mere russet and hodden, with their rude arms, rude array, with their fanatic Gaelic frenzy and wild-yelling battle-cry of God and the King, dash at us like a dark whirlwind; and blow the best-disciplined Nationals we can get into panic and sauve-qui-peut!  Field after field is theirs; one sees not where it will end.  Commandant Santerre may be sent thither; but with non-effect; he might as well have returned and brewed beer.

It has become peremptorily necessary that a National Convention cease arguing, and begin acting.  Yield one party of you to the other, and do it swiftly.  No theoretic outlook is here, but the close certainty of ruin; the very day that is passing over must be provided for.

It was Friday the eighth of March when this Job’s-post from Dumouriez, thickly preceded and escorted by so many other Job’s-posts, reached the National Convention.  Blank enough are most faces.  Little will it avail whether our Septemberers be punished or go unpunished; if Pitt and Cobourg are coming in, with one punishment for us all; nothing now between Paris itself and the Tyrants but a doubtful Dumouriez, and hosts in loose-flowing loud retreat!—­Danton the Titan rises in this hour, as always in the hour of need.  Great is his voice, reverberating from the domes:—­Citizen-Representatives, shall we not, in such crisis of Fate, lay aside discords?  Reputation:  O what is the reputation of this man or of that?  Que mon nom soit fletri, que la France soit libre, Let my name be blighted; let France be free!  It is necessary now again that France rise, in swift vengeance, with her million right-hands, with her heart as of one man.  Instantaneous recruitment in Paris; let every Section of Paris furnish its thousands; every section of France!  Ninety-six Commissioners