The men of letters in the Assembly were, many of them, attached to this faction. They had originally been kept in the background by the lawyers and mercantile part of the Assembly. Many of them possessed great talents, and were by nature men of honour and of virtue. But in great revolutions, it is impossible to resist the dizzying effect of enthusiastic feeling and excited passion. In the violence of their zeal for the liberty of France, they too frequently adopted the maxim, that so glorious an object sanctioned almost any means which could be used to attain it. Under the exaggerated influence of a mistaken patriotism, they were too apt to forget that a crime remains the same in character, even when perpetrated in a public cause.[81] It was among these ardent men that first arose the idea of forming a Club, or Society, to serve as a point of union for those who entertained the same political sentiments. Once united, they rendered their sittings public, combined them with affiliated societies in all parts of France, and could thus, as from one common centre, agitate the most remote frontiers with the passionate feelings which electrified the metropolis. This formidable weapon was, in process of time, wrested out of the hands of the Federalists, as the original Republicans were invidiously called, by the faction who were generally termed JACOBINS, from their influence in that society, and whose existence and peculiarities as a party, we have now to notice. [Sidenote: JACOBINS.]