NOT A PARTY MAN. 39 
Heberts. There is courage, Gentlemen, in coming for- 
ward as the defenders of a man, who for nearly half a 
century has been regarded as the symbol, the type, of 
political cruelty. On this claim alone the new historians 
hope to be listened to without prejudice: an honourable 
character, joined to incontestable talent, gives them no 
less a right to the serious attention of the public. For 
my part, I have no business here to try to pierce those 
thick clouds; my subject does not require it; I will ab- 
solve Carnot from all participation in great crimes, 
without examining whether they should be imputed to 
Collot d’Herbois, or to Billaud-Varennes, rather than to 
_ Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon. 
In no instance of his long political career, was Carnot 
a party-man. Never was he found to try to bring for- 
ward his opinions, his systems, his principles, by tortuous 
ways that honour, that justice, that probity, could not 
have acknowledged. 
In reporting on the 9th of June 1792, on the commis- 
sion charged to propose some reparation in favour of the 
families of ‘Theobald Dillon and of Berthois, who were 
massacred by their own troops before Lille, he does not 
coquette with his rigorous duty. Any other man, in 
such harassing times, might perhaps have thought it 
requisite to consider the susceptibility of the army; but 
he seemed to think no words too severe to brand such 
an odious act of wrong-headedness: he exclaimed, “I 
will not remind you of the circumstances of that atrocity. 
Posterity, in reading our history, will deem it rather the 
crime of a horde of cannibals, than that of a free people.” 
In 1792, some National Guards, under the name of 
confederates, assembled in great numbers at Soissons, 
and already formed there the nucleus of an army of 
