Page:Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov - The Bourgeois Revolution- Its Attainments and Its Limitations - tr. Henry Kuhn (1926).pdf/20

 less, so long as it was necessary for the defense of the country.

After the Montagnards had called to arms the entire French youth, without being able to supply the newly-formed. armies even insufficiently with arms and food out of the slender means flowing to them from taxation, they resorted to requisitions, confiscations, forced loans, decreed rates of exchange for the "assignats"—in short and in fine they forced upon the seared possessing classes money sacrifices, all in the interest of an imperiled country for which the people sacrificed blood. These forcible measures were absoJutely necessary if France were to be saved, There was no depending upon voluntary money contributions—Janet himself admits that. The iron determination and energy of the government was also necessary to spur to the limit of effort all the fresh forces of France—Janet admits that, too. But he, Paul Janet, would rather have seen the dictatorship in the hands of the "noble and magnanimous Gironde," than in those of the abominable Jacobins. Had the Girondists emerged victori-