Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 7.djvu/169



both. But I maintain that the character which your deliberation has hitherto taken on tends directly against the goal.

Louis was king and the Republic is founded; the great question which occupies you is decided by these words alone. Louis has been dethroned for his crimes; Louis denounced the French people as rebels; to chastise them he has invoked the arms of his brother tyrants. Victory and the people have decided that he was the rebel: hence Louis can not be judged; he is judged already. He is condemned, or the Republic is not absolved. To propose a trial for Louis XVI. in any way whatever is to retrograde toward royal and constitutional despotism; it is a counter-revolutionary idea, for it is putting the revolution itself on trial.

Indeed, if Louis can still be the object, of a trial, Louis can be absolved; he can be innocent. What do I say? He is presumed to be so until he is judged. But if Louis is absolved, if Louis can be presumed to be innocent, what does the Revolution become? If Louis is innocent, all the defenders of liberty become calumniators. All the rebels were friends of truth and the defenders of oppressed innocence; all the manifestoes of foreign courts are but legitimate protestations against a ruling faction. Even the confinement which Louis has suffered until the present time is an unjust persecution; the confederates, the people of Paris, all the patriots of the French dominion are guilty; and this great trial pending 137