guillotine all who come before them.--**

* The Convention formally voted their approbation of this measure,
and Collot d'Herbois, in a report on the subject, makes a kind of
apostrophical panegyric on the humanity of his colleagues. "Which
of you, Citizens, (says he,) would not have fired the cannon? Which
of you would not joyfully have destroyed all these traitors at a
blow?"

** About this time a woman who sold newspapers, and the printer of
them, were guillotined for paragraphs deemed incivique.

--Yet this government is not more terrible than it is minutely vexations.
One's property is as little secure as one's existence. Revolutionary
committees every where sequestrate in the gross, in order to plunder in
detail.*

* The revolutionary committees, when they arrested any one,
pretended to affix seals in form. The seal was often, however, no
other than the private one of some individual employed--sometimes
only a button or a halfpenny, which was broken as often as the
Committee wanted access to the wine or other effects. Camille
Desmoulins, in an address to Freron, his fellow-deputy, describes
with some humour the mode of proceeding of these revolutionary
pilferers:

_"Avant hier, deux Commissaires de la section de Mutius Scaevola, montent
chez lui--ils trouvent dans la bibliotheque des livres de droit; et
non-obstant le decret qui porte qu'on ne touchera point Domat ni a Charles
Dumoulin, bien qu'ils traitent de matieres feodales, ils sont main basse