This latter party, of which Brissot was the journalist, Petion the popular member, Vergniaud the genius, the party of the Girondists the body, entered on the scene with the boldness and unity of a conspiracy. It was the _bourgeoisie_ triumphant, envious, turbulent, eloquent, the aristocracy of talent, desiring to acquire and control by itself alone liberty, power, and the people. The Assembly was made up of unequal portions of three elements; the constitutionalists, who formed the aristocratic liberty and moderate monarchy party; the Girondists, the party of the movement, sustained until the Revolution fell into their hands; the Jacobins, the party of the people, and of philosophy in action; the first arrangement and transition, the second boldness and intrigue, the third fanaticism and devotion. Of these last two parties the Jacobin was not the most hostile to the king. The aristocracy and the clergy destroyed, that party had no repugnance to the throne; it possessed in a high degree the instinct of the unity of power; it was not the Jacobins who first demanded war, and who first uttered the word republic, but it was the first who uttered and often repeated the word _dictatorship_. The word _republic_ appertained to Brissot and the Girondists. If the Girondists, on their coming in to the Assembly, had united with the constitutional party in order to save the constitution by moderate measures, and the Revolution by not urging it into war, they would have saved their party and controlled the throne. The honesty in which their leader was deficient was also wanting in their conduct--they were all intrigue. They made themselves the agitators in an assembly of which they might have been the statesmen. They had not confidence in the republic, but feigned it. In revolutions sincere characters are the only skilful characters. It is glorious to die the victim of a faith; it is pitiful to die the dupe of one's ambition. VI. Three causes of uneasiness agitated men's minds at the moment when the Assembly opened its sittings--the clergy, emigration, and impending war. The Constituent Assembly had committed a gross error in stopping at a half measure in reforming the clergy in France. Mirabeau himself had been weak on this question. The Revolution was at the bottom only the legitimate rising of political liberty against despotism, and of religious liberty against the legal domination of Catholicism, because a political institution. The constitution had emancipated the citizens, and it was necessary to emancipate the faithful, and to claim consciences for the state, in order to restore them to themselves, to individual reason, and to God. This is what philosophy desired, which is only the rational expression of the mind's impulses.