They persist all the same, five or six talking at once, misconstruing the sense the words they use, and each contradicting the other in point of detail, but all agreeing to impose silence on him: "You should not run counter to the popular will, for in doing this you preach civil war, bring the assembly's decrees into contempt, and irritate the nation." Evidently, for them, they constitute the nation, or, more or less, they represent it.

Through this self-investiture they are at once magistrates, censors, and police, while the scolded journalist is only too glad, in his case, to have them stop at injunctions .-- Three days before this he is advised that a body of rioters in his neighborhood "threatened to treat his house like that of M.de Castries," in which everything had been smashed and thrown out the windows.

At another time, apropos of the suspensive or absolute veto; "four savage fellows came to his domicile to warn him, showing him their pistols, that if he dared write in behalf of M.Mounier he should answer for it with his life." Thus, from the outset, "just as the nation begins to enjoy the inestimable right of free thought and free speech, factional tyrants lose no time in depriving citizens of these, proclaiming to all that would maintain the integrity of their consciences: Tremble, die, or believe as we do!" After this, to impose silence on those who express what is offensive, the crowd, the club, the section, decree and execute, each on its own authority,[1227] searches, arrests, assaults, and, at length, assassinations.

During the month of June, 1792, "three decrees of arrest and fifteen denunciations, two acts of affixing seals, four civic invasions of his premises, and the confiscation of whatever belonged to him in France" is the experience of Mallet du Pan.

He passes four years "without knowing with any certainty on going to bed whether he should get out of it in the morning alive and free." Later on, if he escapes the guillotine and the lantern, it is owing to exile.