4875. LOUIS XVI., Execution.—[further continued] .
The deed which closed
the mortal course of these sovereigns [Louis
XVI. and Marie Antoinette], I shall neither
approve nor condemn. I am not prepared to
say that the first magistrate of a nation cannot
commit treason against his country, or is unamenable
to its punishment; nor yet, that where
there is no written law, no regulated tribunal,
there is not a law in our hearts, and a power
in our hands, given for righteous employment
in maintaining right and redressing wrong. Of
those who judged the King, many thought him
wilfully criminal; many that his existence would
keep the nation in perpetual conflict with the
horde of kings who would war against a regeneration
which might come home to themselves,
and that it were better that one should
die than all. I should not have voted with this
portion of the legislature. I should have shut
up the Queen in a convent, putting harm out
of her power, and placed the King in his station,
investing him with limited powers, which,
I verily believe, he would have honestly exercised
according to the measure of his understanding.
In this way no void would have been
created, courting the usurpation of a military
adventurer, nor occasion given for those
enormities which demoralized the nations of
the world, and destroyed and are yet to destroy
millions and millions of its inhabitants.—
Autobiography. Washington ed. i, 101.
Ford ed., i, 141.
(1821)
