reprobates. Like the elder Brutus, he feigned idiocy, but it was not to
save his country, it was to urge it to the uttermost bounds of madness,
and then control it by its very insanity. All his pamphlets, echoes of
the Jacobins and Cordeliers, daily excited the uneasiness, suspicions,
and terrors of the people.

"Citizens," said he, "watch closely around this palace: the inviolable
asylum of all plots against the nation, there a perverse queen lords it
over an imbecile king and rears the cubs of tyranny. Lawless priests
there consecrate the arms of insurrection against the people. They
prepare the Saint Bartholomew of patriots. The genius of Austria is
there, hidden in the committees over which Antoinette presides; they
correspond with foreigners, and by concealed means forward to them the
gold and arms of France, so that the tyrants who are assembling in arms
on your frontier may find you famished and disarmed. The
emigrants--d'Artois and Condé--there receive instructions of the coming
vengeance of despotism. A guard of Swiss stipendiaries is not enough for
the liberticide schemes of the Capets. Every night the good citizens who
watch around this den see the ancient nobility entering stealthily and
concealing arms beneath their clothes. Can knights of the poignard be
any thing but the enrolled assassins of the people? What is La Fayette
doing,--is he a dupe or an accomplice? Why does he leave free the
avenues of the palace, which is only opened for vengeance or flight? Why
do we leave the Revolution incomplete, and also leave in the hands of
our crowned enemy, still in the midst of us, the time to overcome and
destroy it? Do you not see that specie is disappearing and assignats are
discredited? What means the assemblings on your frontier of emigrants
and armed bodies, who are advancing to enclose you in a circle of iron?
What are your ministers doing? Why is not the property of emigrants
confiscated, their houses burnt, their heads set at a price? In whose