The revolutionary tribunal was reorganized, consisting of twenty judges,
a jury, and a public accuser. Merlin of Douai, a consummate jurist,
proposed a statute, in every line of which suspicion, treachery, and
hate found an arsenal of revenge. It provided that: "Immediately after
the publication of this present decree, all suspected persons who are
found in the territory of the republic, and who are still at liberty,
shall be arrested.
"Are deemed suspected all persona who, by their conduct, writings, or
language, have proved themselves partisans of tyranny, federalism, and
enemies of liberty;
"Those who can not prove they possess the means of existence, and that
they have fully performed all of their duties as citizens;
"Those to whom certificates of citizenship have been refused;
"Those of noble families--fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, sisters,
husbands, wives, and agents--who have not constantly manifested their
attachment to the Revolution."
The traveler, standing upon the stone seats of the Flavian amphitheater,
looks down into the arena, and peoples the Coliseum with the criminals
and the innocent martyrs, shut out from hope by its merciless walls and
by a populace more merciless, and slain by thousands by wild beasts and
swordsmen and spearsmen, to make a Roman holiday. How complacently he
felicitates himself upon the assumption that modern times present
nothing like this. But less than one hundred years ago, the pen of a
lawyer erected in France a statute which inclosed a kingdom with its
architectural horror, made one arena of an empire, and in one year drank
up more blood than sank into the sands of the Coliseum in centuries.
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