Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 7.djvu/185

Rh committee should call down, without ceremony, without shame, and without remorse, capital punishment on my head, and cite articles of the penal code, which, according to its interpretation, condemned me to death. I doubt not that such is the object which they have in view. How many statesmen have been tormented with despair as to keeping me in prison, smothering my voice, and restraining my pen? Did not one of them, the atrocious Lacaze, have the impudence to ask the Convention, as Dumouriez and Cobourg asked, that I should be outlawed? So that the act of accusation becomes a veritable "verdict rendered," which has only now to be executed.

This act is a tissue of lies and fabrications. It accuses me of having incited to murder and pillage, of setting up a "Chief of State," dishonoring and dissolving a convention, etc. The contrary can be proved to be true simply by reading my writings. I demand a consecutive reading; for it is not by garbling and mutilating passages that the ideas of an author are to be learned, but by reading the context; then the meaning may be judged.