36 CARNOT. 
Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon, Billaud-Varennes, and 
Collot d’Herbois, reserved to themselves politics, general 
police, and measures of security. In each species of 
subject one signature alone was important, and carried 
responsibility ; the others, though required by law, were 
to be regarded as the accomplishment of a simple for- 
mality : it was evident, indeed, that they would have to 
be given without discussion and even without examina- 
tion. : 
Such were, Gentlemen, the bases of the agreement 
which Robert Lindet, for his personal security, caused 
to be put down in a written declaration, and by the aid 
of which the members of the Committee of Public Safety 
expected to be able, without passing beyond the terms of 
their mandate, to exorcise the storms which were menac- 
ing the country from all sides. This confiding arrange- 
ment will doubtless be blamed: some will cry out at its 
illegality, others at its imprudence. I will remind the 
first, that the members of the Committee, entangled in a 
faulty organization, were every day at issue with an im- 
possibility, and that the word ¢mpossible is French, what- 
ever national amour propre may have said of it at a 
period when the admirable triumphs of our armies seemed 
to warrant all hyperbolic speeches. The reproach of im- 
prudence I admit without reserve. I add that, on the 
part of Carnot, this imprudence was voluntary ; that in 
resigning himself to signing, without examination, the 
decisions of all his colleagues, he wittingly made the 
greatest of all sacrifices to France; that he placed his 
- honour in the hands of several of his declared enemies ; 
that, counting eventually on the tardy justice of posterity, 
he hoisted that almost superhuman motto of one of the 
most powerful organizations which the Revolution brought 
