All is silent. Save the faubourgs, Paris was a vast sick chamber, where no one dared to speak above his breath. This moral abdication is the true psychological phenomenon of the siege, all the more extraordinary that it co-existed with an admirable ardour for resistance. Men who speak of going to seek death with their wives and children, who say, "We will burn our houses rather than surrender them to the enemy,"[19] get angry at any controversy as to the power intrusted to the men of the Hotel-de-Ville. If they dread the giddy-headed, the fanatics, or compromising collaborators, why do they not take the direction of the movement into their own hands? But they confine themselves to crying, "No insurrection before the enemy! No fanatics!" as though capitulation were better than an insurrection; as though the 10th of August 1792 and 31st May 1793 had not been insurrections before the enemy; as though there were no medium between abdication and delirium. And you, citizens of the old sections of 1792-93, who furnished ideas to the Convention and the Commune, who dictated to them the means of safety, who directed the clubs and fraternal societies, entertained in Paris a hundred luminous centres, say, do you recognise your offspring in these gulls, weaklings, jealous of the people, prostrate before the Left like devotees before the host? On the 5th and 7th they renewed their plebiscitory vote, naming twelve of the twenty mayors named by Arago, four amongst them, Dubail, Vautrain, Tirard, and Desmarets, belonging to the pure reaction. The greater part of the adjuncts were of the Liberal type. The faubourgs, always at their post, elected Delescluze in the nineteenth arrondissement and Ranvier, Milliere, Lefrancais, and Flourens in the twentieth. These latter could not take their seats. The Government, violating the convention of Dorian and Tamisier, had issued warrants for their arrest, and for that of about twenty other revolutionists.[20] Thus, out of seventy-five effective members, mayors and adjuncts, there were not ten revolutionists. These shadows of municipal councillors looked upon themselves as the stewards of the Defence, forbade themselves any indiscreet question, were on their best behaviour, feeding and administering Trochu's patient. They allowed the insolent and incapable Ferry to be appointed to the central mairie, and Clement-Thomas, the executioner of June 1848, to be made commander-in-chief of the National Guard. For seventy days, feeling the pulse of Paris growing from hour to hour more weak, they never had the honesty, the courage to say to the Government, "Where are you leading us?"