of those orations which survive time, and which protest, in the name of
reason and philosophy, against the blindness and atrocity of criminal
legislation. He demonstrated with the most profound logic that society,
by reserving to itself the right of homicide, justifies it to a certain
extent in the murderer, and that the means most efficacious for
preventing murder and making it infamous was to evince its own horror of
the crime. Robespierre, who subsequently was fated to allow of unlimited
immolation, demanded that society should be disarmed of the power of
putting to death. If the prejudices of jurists had not prevailed over
the wholesome doctrines of moral philosophy, who can say how much blood
might not have been spared in France.

But these discussions confined to the interior of the Manège, occupied
less public attention than the fierce controversies of the periodical
press. Journalism, that universal and daily _forum_ of the people's
passions, had expanded with the progress of liberty. All ardent minds
had eagerly embraced it, Mirabeau himself having set the example when he
descended from the tribune. He wrote his letters to his constituents in
the _Courrier de Provence_. Camille Desmoulins, a young man of great
talent but weak reasoning powers, threw into his lucubrations for the
press the feverish tumult of his thoughts. Brissot, Gorsas, Carra,
Prudhomme, Fréron, Danton, Fauchet, Condorcet, edited democratic
journals: they began by demanding the abolition of royalty, "the
greatest scourge," said the _Revolutions de Paris_, "which has ever
dishonoured the human species." Marat seemed to have concentrated in
himself all the evil passions which ferment in a society in a state of
decomposition: he constituted himself the permanent representative of
popular hate. By pretending this, he kept it up, writing all the while
with bitterness and ferocity. He became a cynic in order the more
intimately to know the masses. He assumed the language of the lowest