Thus this day, which might have buoyed up the Defence, ended in smoke. The desultoriness, the indiscipline of the patriots restored to the Government its immaculate character of September. It took advantage of it that very night to tear down the placards of Dorian and Schoelcher; it accorded the municipal elections for the 5th, but in exchange demanded a plebiscite, putting the question in the Imperialist style, "Those who wish to maintain the Government will vote _aye_." In vain the Committee of the twenty arrondissements issued a manifesto; in vain the _Reveil_, the _Patrie en Danger_, the _Combat_, enumerated the hundred reasons which made it necessary to answer _No_. Six months after the plebiscite which had made the war, the immense majority of Paris voted the plebiscite that made the capitulation. Let Paris remember and accuse herself. For fear of two or three men she opened fresh credit to this Government which added incapacity to insolence, and said to it, "I want you," 322,000 times. The army, the mobiles, gave 237,000 ayes. There were but 54,000 civilians and 9,000 soldiers to say boldly, _no_. How did it happen that those 60,000 men, so clear-sighted, prompt, and energetic, could not manage to direct public opinion? Simply because they were wanting in _cadres_, in method, in organizers. The fever of the siege had been unable to discipline the revolutionary party, in such dire confusion a few weeks before, nor had the patriarchs of 1848 tried to do so. The Jacobins like Delescluze and Blanqui, instead of leading the people, lived in an exclusive circle of friends. Felix Pyat, vibrating between just ideas and literary epilepsy, only became practical[18] when he had to save his own skin. The others, Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Schoelcher, the hope of the Republicans under the Empire, returned from exile shallow, pursy, rotten to the core with vanity and selfishness, without courage or patriotism, disdaining the Socialists. The dandies of Jacobinism, who called themselves Radicals, Floquet, Clemenceau, Brinon, and other democratic politicians, carefully kept aloof from the working-men. The old Montagnards themselves formed a group of their own, and never came to the Committee of the twenty arrondissements, which only wanted method and political experience to become a power. So it was only a centre of emotions, not of direction,--the Gravilliers section of 1870-71, daring, eloquent, but, like its predecessor, treating of everything by manifestoes. There at least was life, a lamp, not always bright, but always burning. What is the small middle-class contributing now? Where are their Jacobins, even their Cordeliers? At the Corderie I see the proletariat of the small middle-class, men of the pen and orators, but where is the bulk of the army?