One of their
journalists, and, according to their fashion, one of their leading
statesmen, Gorsas, mentions this fact in his newspaper, which he
formerly called the Galley Journal. The title was well suited to the
paper and its author. For some felonies he had been sentenced to the
galleys; but, by the benignity of the late king, this felon (to be one
day advanced to the rank of a regicide) had been pardoned and released
at the intercession of the ambassadors of Tippoo Sultan. His gratitude
was such as might naturally have been expected; and it has lately been
rewarded as it deserved. This liberated galley-slave was raised, in
mockery of all criminal law, to be Minister of Justice: he became from
his elevation a more conspicuous object of accusation, and he has since
received the punishment of his former crimes in proscription and death.
It will be asked, how the Minister of the Home Department was employed
at this crisis. The day after the massacre had commenced, Roland
appeared; but not with the powerful apparatus of a protecting
magistrate, to rescue those who had survived the slaughter of the first
day: nothing of this. On the 3rd of September, (that is, the day after
the commencement of the massacre,[3]) he writes a long, elaborate,
verbose epistle to the Assembly, in which, after magnifying, according
to the _bon-ton_ of the Revolution, his own integrity, humanity,
courage, and patriotism, he first directly justifies all the bloody
proceedings of the 10th of August.
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