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hitherto regarded of the utmost importance, considered as a thing of no value. Of so little consequence did it appear in the eyes of Marat, the friend of the people, that he scrupled not to assert, that, in order to cement liberty, the national club ought to strike off 200,000 heads. During the reign of terror, as it was emphatically termed, "the revolutionary tribunal added daily, for a long "time, new victims to the thousands who had "fallen on the fatal days of August and September.

Here the mockery of justice was complete; for, "in the condemnation of the accused, the convic"tion of the jury, without the examination of "witnesses, or even the confession of the pri

soner, was declared, sufficient to establish guilt." As for the privilege of extending mercy to the condemned, it was contemptuously disclaimed: and all applications for pardon were rejected with the declaration, that the enlightened government of republican France possessed no such power *. It was esteemed indeed a sufficient crime to be sus

pected of being a suspicious person. "In such a state of society, when fortune, honour, and life,

"I fly far off," said the poet Klopstock, " from the cries ❝of that execrable tribunal, which murders not only the “victim, but which murders also the mercy of the people.” Well then might Dumourier observe in his address to his own countrymen," If the despotism of a single individual be dan.

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gerous to liberty, how much more odious must be that of "seven hundred men, many of whom are void of principles, without morals, and who have been able to reach that supre"macy by cabals or crimes alone."

"depended

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"depended upon the caprice of sanguinary individuals, it is not surprising that private assassi"nations were frequently perpetrated with impunity; and, from the torpor and insensibility that "prevailed, were regarded as trivial acts. Sui"cide likewise became the resource of the unfor"tunate, especially of those who had renounced every idea of religion, of the superintendance of a Providence, and of a future existence. Thus "those, who escaped from the tribunal of the

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ruling faction, perished by their own hands. "Valazé stabbed himself; Echelle and Condorcet "preferred poison; L'Huillier killed himself in

prison; Rebecqui drowned himself: they were "both agents in the atrocities of Avignon, and the "second of September. Hidon, and the academi"cian Champfort, fell by their own hands. Such "also was the end of Roland, who was one of the

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principal actors in the revolution of the tenth of "August-In the short space of two years, al

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most every individual of the principal actors in "that revolution was brought to a violent end. "Danton and Westerman, the one who directed, " and the other who executed, the counsels of the "insurgents, perished on the same day, and on "the same scaffold. A similar fate befell many "of those, who decreed the death or imprisonment of the king. Of the 693 members of the "Convention, who voted that the king was guilty,

"it became as the blood of a dead man."

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CL seven were assassinated, eight were suicides, thirty-four were proscribed, ninety-two were imprisoned, and sixty-five were guillotined. The " addition of those, who have since suffered in "various ways, will swell this account to a far greater number. Thus, for a considerable time, " in the interior of France each recent event surpassed in horror that which preceded it; and the "metropolis was the centre of massacre, atheism, "and anarchy. The conduct of the governors and "the governed was equally an outrage to all decorum, humanity, and consistency of conduct-In short, it appears, that there have been two mil"lions of persons murdered in France, since it has "called itself a republic *." After the downfall of Robespierre, the effusion of blood began to abate for the vial of the second angel was then exhausted. France, however, was previously converted into a vast Aceldama; or, to use the strong language of prophecy, its revolutionary sea "be"came as the blood of a dead man, and every living, "soul died in the sea."

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3. "And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters, and they "became blood. And I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, which 86 art, and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus. For they have shed the blood of "saints and prophets, and thou hast given them

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* Kett's Hist. the Inter. vol. ii. p. 243-252.

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"blood to drink; for they are worthy. And I "heard another out of the altar say, Even so, "Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments."

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As the sea signifies a nation in a violent state of revolutionary tumult, so rivers and fountains symbolize kingdoms and their heads existing in the opposite state of a regular and settled government. These mystic streams are the different powers of the papal Latin empire; which were now to receive, by the unheard of inroads of a barbarous republican enemy, the due reward of their former persecutions of the saints. By a long and bloody war, the whole constitution of the Germanic body has been shaken to its very centre; and its emperor, the successor and representative of Charles the fifth that great enemy of the witnesses, and of the perjured Sigismund that wretched tool of papal malice, trembling for the safety of his capital, has been compelled to sue for an ignominious peace with the republic of France. In the course of the same war, papal Italy has been overrun and pillaged of every thing valuable: Savoy, the ancient parent and persecutor of the Waldenses, has been wrested from its sovereign, nothing in a manner being left to him but the empty title of a king: Spain, after suffering for a time the horrors of war, has been reduced in effect to the state of a mere vassal province of France: the renegado inhabitants of the united provinces, who preferred their pelf to their God, and whose polluted presses had

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long teemed with the blasphemous productions of Voltaire and his associates, have been first duped into a revolution, and have ever since been plundered and harassed by their unrelenting tyrants: and the Helvetic confederacy, in name partly papal and partly protestant, but in reality tainted with atheism to its very core *, has been dissolved; its citizens have been massacred; and its territory has been plundered, by the infernal cruelty and harpy rapacity of republican banditti. Future historians will speak of this unparalleled war with astonishment. They will describe Europe as bleeding at every pore, and trembling for the fate of every civilized government. They will detail battle after battle, massacre after massacre, campaign after campaign. They will represent fertile provinces wasted with fire and sword: and they will speak with horror of rapes and murders, of pillage and extortion †, of prisoners deliberately put to death

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"Holland was the grand asylum of infidelity in the North, the nursery and chief propagator of its works by the licentious liberty allowed to the press"-and as for Switzerland, D'Alembert and Voltaire boasted, that "in Calvin's own town "there were but a few beggarly fellows who believed in “Christ, and that from Geneva to Berne not a Christian was to "be found."

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+ Such was the rapacity of the republican tyrants, that “two years had been sufficient to place the countries conquered by "France," the Netherlands, Holland, and the states situated between the Meuse and the Rhine, " on a level with herself, "and to reduce them to one common equality of death and 66 misery These countries, but a short time before so rich and

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