and the neighbouring terrace was supposed to belong to the Assembly, and the public were excluded from the main area of the gardens.

Whilst the king and the royal family were in this afflicting situation, declining all offers from La Fayette and the Constitutionalists, and suspending their fate on the interference of the foreign armies, you will now observe how formidable were the movements of the popular party. There is something of mystery still hangs over the intentions of Vergniaud, and the more civilized portion of them, as far as the king's life was concerned: they would probably have suffered him to rule, if he would have ruled according to their directions, but they had united with the Jacobins against La Fayette and the Constitutionalists, and as the king would not give them their measures and their ministers (the two decrees and the three patriots, Roland, Clavière, and Servan), they proceeded to oppose the allied powers in their own way; they resolved to seize upon the government, and, as a preliminary step, they immediately set about dethroning the king.

The first point to be carried was a declaration that the country was in danger. Under colour of this plea, any revolutionary measure was possible; and you will now observe, as you read the history, the tremendous speech of Vergniaud. You will acquire a sufficient idea of it from the books within your reach, from the History by the Two Friends of Liberty; from Mignet, and more especially from Thiers, but above all, from the appendix to Bertrand de Moleville's Annals.

Vergniaud was the next great orator of the Revolution, in time and merit, immediately after Mirabeau, and, like him, he could always carry along with him, by the mere effect of his reasoning powers and his eloquence, that large mass that is floating and uncertain in every public assembly while it is in a revolutionary state and has not yet subsided into regular trains of self-interest or party attachment.

This speech is so fully given in the Moniteur, and in the appendix to Bertrand de Moleville's Annals; and the French orators, with the exception of Mirabeau and the Abbé de Maury, were so much in the habit of reading their speeches, that we may here suppose ourselves in possession of the speech as it was delivered. In general, and in the case of speeches that are really spoken, we read in a few minutes, when we read only reports of them, what may have taken hours in the delivery. We have a skeleton laid before us, not a form presented to us

beaming and instinct with all its original life and beauty; and we are then to endeavour, by our own powers of reflection and imagination, rather to conceive what in reality the orator must have made of the main hints and topics that are now exhibited to our view, and rather to imagine what the speech must have been, than to suppose that we see what it really was. But in the present instance we are more fortunately situated; we have the speech as it was delivered. Much had been expected from it. A great crowd was collected: the two opposite sides of the Assembly were quite at issue. Was the country properly defended or not? Such was the question. The Prussians were in the mean time in full march. It seemed a question of life and death. Were the king and the ministers faithful, or were they traitors? Not a moment was to be lost.

I will endeavour to give you some notion of this address to the Assembly and to the galleries, that you may turn to it hereafter yourselves. The orator drew a picture of the situation of France, the armies falling back, and foreign invaders advancing, reaching the frontier. "And is this, then, the moment," said he, "chosen for dismissing the popular ministers, and rejecting the measures which they thought it necessary to propose?

We have dangers from within, we have dangers from without. To secure us from the first, a decree has been proposed against the priests. (This, you may remember, had been resisted by the king.) Does the genius of the Medicis still wander about the precincts of the Tuileries? Is Le Tellier still there? Are we to see again the night of St. Bartholomew, and the dragonnades of Louis XIV.? This cannot be the meaning of the king; he can wish for no religious troubles. He is assured, therefore, that the existing laws are a sufficient protection for us. The ministers, therefore, must answer for our safety with their heads.

"To secure us from the dangers without, a camp of reserve has been proposed. The king has produced his veto. It is not to be supposed that he can mean to deliver up France to the enemy. He is assured, then, that he has a force sufficient for our protection. Once more, then, let the ministers answer with their heads for the safety of the public.

"But hear me further," said the orator (he had been speaking now some time): the audience were breathless. "It is in the name of the king that these French princes have endea voured to raise Europe up in arms against us: it is to avenge

the dignity of the king, that the treaty of Pilnitz is concluded; it is to maintain the splendour of the throne, that the king of Bohemia and Hungary wages war against us, and that Prussia is on our frontiers. Now, what do I read in the constitution? The article I read is this:- If the king shall put himself at the head of an army, or direct the force of it against the nation; or shall not oppose himself by a formal act ('par un acte formel') against every enterprise of the kind that is executed in his name, he shall be considered as having abdicated the throne.'

"What then is this formal act? If one hundred thousand Austrians are marching upon Flanders, and one hundred thousand Prussians on Alsace, and should the king oppose to them ten or twenty thousand men, would this, then, have been a formal act of opposition to them?

"If, again, the king, charged to notify the approach of hostilities, shall be instructed of the movements of the Prussian army, and yet make no communication to the National Assembly; if a camp of reserve, necessary to stop the progress of the enemy in the interior, should be proposed, and this, too, be rejected by the king, and a plan substituted, uncertain in itself, and taking a long time to execute; and if the king leave the army to be commanded by a general (La Fayette) who is an intriguer, and an object of suspicion to the nation; and if another general (Luckner), brought up far from the corruption of a court and familiar with victory, should ask for a reinforcement, and if the king, by refusing it, should seem to say, I forbid your conquering;' why then, I ask again, would all this in the king be formal acts of opposition to the enemy?

"I have spoken in an exaggerated manner," resumed Vergniaud," that no applications may be made of what I put merely in the way of hypothesis; but I must develop the true nature of the case.

"If now, such should be the result of any conduct like this, that France should be deluged in blood, the constitution be overthrown, and a counter-revolution take place, and the king should then come forward and say, It is true that the enemy pretends to act only in assertion of my rights and dignity, but I have proved that I am not their accomplice; I have sent armies against them, they were not strong enough to oppose them, but the constitution has not determined what the strength of the armies I was to send should be; I assembled them too late, but the constitution has said nothing of the time of their assem

bling; the Assembly has sent me decrees that would have been serviceable, and I rejected them, but I had the right to do so. I have done every thing that the constitution has prescribed; how is it possible, then, to doubt my fidelity?—If this should be his language," (and applauses were heard while the orator continued in this strain), "should we not have a right to answer, What is it then to defend us, to oppose to the enemy forces whose inferiority ensures our defeat? Is it to defend us, to nullify all projects that would fortify the interior? The constitution has left you the choice of ministers, but is it for our happiness or our destruction? has made you the head of the army, but is it for our glory or our disgrace? has given you the right of veto, a civil list, and so many prerogatives, but is it to enable you, in a constitutional manner, to destroy both the constitution and the empire?

"No, no! Man! whom the generosity of the French has been unable to affect, and who can be touched by the mere love of despotism alone, you are no longer fit for the constitution that you have so unworthily violated, nor the people whom you have so basely betrayed."

The historian Thiers here stops, and then proceeds to give an account of the measures which Vergniaud proposed, discontinuing his analysis of the speech; but when you come to look at the appendix of Bertrand, you will find the remainder of this terrible harangue, not less powerful nor less eloquent than that part which preceded it. I have, however, pointed out the whole to your curiosity, and I cannot dwell upon it much longer. Knowing as you now do the particulars of the mission of Mallet du Pan, and what really was passing between the king and the allied sovereigns, there were several observations made by Vergniaud, that you will perceive were of a fearful nature.

"As it is of consequence," said he, "to the personal safety of the king, as well as to the tranquillity of the realm, that his conduct should be no more encompassed with suspicions, as the most perfect openness in his movements and explanations can alone prevent the measures of extremity and the bloody contentions that such suspicions are fitted to produce, I shall propose a message to his majesty, which will apprize him of the truths I have been developing, which will show him that the system of neutrality which they seem to have wished him to adopt between Coblentz and France, would be in itself a treason, unworthy of the king of the French; that from his neutrality there would result to him no other glory than the deepest horror

on the part of the nation, and the most notorious contempt on the part of the conspirators against us; and that having already decided for France, he ought to proclaim aloud his unalterable resolution with her and her constitution to triumph or to fall."

Fearful expressions these! And again :-" You must declare the country in danger," said Vergniaud, "and you will see renewed the prodigies which have covered with glory so many of the nations of antiquity. Why are the French to be supposed less elevated than they? Will they not have objects equally sacred to defend? Is it not for their parents, their children and their wives, is it not for their country and for liberty, that they will have to contend? Has the lapse of ages, then, enfeebled in the human heart those sublime and tender affections, or has it enervated the courage which they inspire? No, no; doubtless they are as eternal as the nature from which they spring.

"But the declaration must be made. See you not the smile of our enemies here within, which announces to you the approach of the tyrants that have coalesced against you from without? Whence comes it that the constituted authorities are at variance with each other; that our armed force forgets that its very essence is obedience; that soldiers and that generals undertake to influence, and to carry along with them in their measures, the Legislative Body? Is it a military government that we wish established? We hear murmurs arise, and they are directed against the court; and who will venture to say they are unjust? The court is suspected of perfidious projects; and what traits are there in its conduct to show that such suspicions are unfounded? Popular movements are spoken of, and a law martial. The imagination is to be familiarized, then, to the shedding of the blood of the people. The palace of the king of the French is on a sudden to be changed into a fortress and a stronghold; and where, in the meantime, is the enemy, and against whom are pointed the cannons and the bayonets? The cohorts of our invaders are already, in their presumption, parcelling out our territory, and we are meanwhile divided among ourselves. Intrigue and perfidy are weaving their treasons; and when the Legislative Body opposes to their machinations decrees that, though rigorous, are necessary, an all-powerful hand interferes, and tears them to pieces. Our fortunes, our lives, and liberty itself is menaced; anarchy approaches; and despotism alone lifts up its head (though so long bowed down), enjoys our miseries, and waits only to devour its prey. Call, then, while it is yet time, call, I say, upon all Frenchmen to save their country.