to the previous speaker, because I am, and I assert it, a partisan of the most unlimited declaration of opinions; but it is beyond human endurance for me to conceal the contempt I feel for such diatribes.  If you adopt the disbanding proposed you will no longer have an army, our frontiers will be delivered up to foreign invasion, and the interior to excesses and the pillage of an infuriated soldiery.”  These energetic words were the funeral oration of the old army, the project of the committee was adopted.

The discussion on the abolition of the punishment of death presented to Adrien Duport an opportunity to pronounce in favour of the abolition one of those orations which survive time, and which protest, in the name of reason and philosophy, against the blindness and atrocity of criminal legislation.  He demonstrated with the most profound logic that society, by reserving to itself the right of homicide, justifies it to a certain extent in the murderer, and that the means most efficacious for preventing murder and making it infamous was to evince its own horror of the crime.  Robespierre, who subsequently was fated to allow of unlimited immolation, demanded that society should be disarmed of the power of putting to death.  If the prejudices of jurists had not prevailed over the wholesome doctrines of moral philosophy, who can say how much blood might not have been spared in France.

But these discussions confined to the interior of the Manege, occupied less public attention than the fierce controversies of the periodical press.  Journalism, that universal and daily forum of the people’s passions, had expanded with the progress of liberty.  All ardent minds had eagerly embraced it, Mirabeau himself having set the example when he descended from the tribune.  He wrote his letters to his constituents in the Courrier de Provence.  Camille Desmoulins, a young man of great talent but weak reasoning powers, threw into his lucubrations for the press the feverish tumult of his thoughts.  Brissot, Gorsas, Carra, Prudhomme, Freron, Danton, Fauchet, Condorcet, edited democratic journals:  they began by demanding the abolition of royalty, “the greatest scourge,” said the Revolutions de Paris, “which has ever dishonoured the human species.”  Marat seemed to have concentrated in himself all the evil passions which ferment in a society in a state of decomposition:  he constituted himself the permanent representative of popular hate.  By pretending this, he kept it up, writing all the while with bitterness and ferocity.  He became a cynic in order the more intimately to know the masses.  He assumed the language of the lowest reprobates.  Like the elder Brutus, he feigned idiocy, but it was not to save his country, it was to urge it to the uttermost bounds of madness, and then control it by its very insanity.  All his pamphlets, echoes of the Jacobins and Cordeliers, daily excited the uneasiness, suspicions, and terrors of the people.