112 
JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
hands, without its natural leaders, was master of the situation; 
but was always the prey of demagogues, and led by the most 
extreme. In this revolution the mob of Paris, the most lawless in 
the country, was supreme. In their own day they had seen the 
same state of things. There was nothing so savagely timorous as 
a mob, and in this fact they had at once the secret of the Reign of 
Terror. He denied that the leaders of the Reign of Terror were 
honest enthusiasts or simple bigots, as was often said. If those 
terms were applicable to any men of that time it was to the 
Girondins. The Reign of Terror did nothing to save the country, 
which had already been saved before it reached its height. In fact 
it was not aimed against the enemies of the country, but against 
all decent people. Who were the leaders of those times ? Marat, 
and Danton, and Hebert were generally given up as indefensible. 
Ko writer had ever been found to say a word on the part of Carrier 
or Collet d'Herbois. The most important personages of all were 
Robespierre and St. Just. In truth they had a side which if not 
favourable was different to the entire blackness of their associates. 
They were probably sincere ; and their desire was to destroy all 
who were opposed to them, and then to form a government founded 
on virtue. The excesses of the Reign of Terror were the work of 
few hands, the bulk of the population waiting tremblingly to 
advance their true sentiments. Their opportunity came at the fall 
of Robespierre. The misfortune of Prance then and now was the 
want of any political initiative amongst the middle and intelligent 
classes. The Prench required to be led more than any other 
nation. They were easily administered, but not easily governed. 
They had no machinery for the expression of public opinion ; they 
grumbled and they plotted, and then they rushed into the street 
and had a revolution, the mob ruling until, like Sinbad's Old Man 
of the Sea, it fell off in its own drunkenness. What the revolu- 
tion really did was so to sicken everybody who had more than his 
head to lose with the jargon of liberty and equality, and to deliver 
the nation bound hand and foot to the first Kapoleon for nearly a 
score of years, until he left it far worse than he found it. To the 
revolution also was traceable the rise of the second empire, and the 
disasters which had befallen Prance in the present year. Benefit- 
ing no nation it- had delayed progress everywhere, and its only 
advantage was that it presented a model of what it was most 
desirable to avoid. 
