The moment therefore that the majority of the Committee refused to follow Robespierre’s lead, he would have had to ascend the tribune of the Convention, and in one of those speeches which carried to some such genuine conviction, but to many others such still more genuine fear, he would have had to obtain a majority for the reconstruction of the great Committee. Now a deliberative Assembly which is not strictly organised upon party lines, which has no aristocratic quality and no great (because traditional) corporate pride, is very strongly influenced by what we call “Public Opinion.” It hears reports from the whole nation, is composed of every kind of man, regards itself moreover as in duty bound to listen to the voices outside, meets in its lobbies and during its recesses every species of expression. Such a jury is therefore the very worst before which a popular idol could present itself when some strong adverse action had just shown his reputation to be falling. Outvoted in Committee, condemned in Parliament, the man who had but just now been supreme would have to turn to whatever he could find of physical force to support him. But that physical force in the case of Robespierre was only the populace of Paris, and a populace moreover whose one organising centre—the Commune—had been weakened by himself. Once suppose him forced to depend upon a rising of the people, and the weakness of his position is apparent; even were he still the politician of the majority, it would be a long step from approving of his policy to risking one’s life in a civil tumult, conscious that one was attacking every form of constituted authority, and presumably the opinion of the whole nation, for no principle, from no necessity, but to save a man. As we shall see, the rising to defend him comprised but a small knot of men, and totally failed. The man who had not the wits to cook an egg prepared his own ruin. Carnot, whose one idea was to work and save the frontier, he openly menaced. Robespierre meditated the inconceivable folly of replacing Carnot’s science by the blind activity of St. Just. In alienating Carnot and losing that possible ally, Robespierre lost five of his colleagues on the Committee. The end of Messidor saw him in a kind of voluntary isolation, letting the fatal machine work on, while he stood off from the levers.