"France is transformed into a gaming-table, where, alongside of the discontented citizen offering his stakes, sits, bold, blustering, and with fermenting brain, the pretentious subaltern rattling his dice-box... At the sight of a public official rising from nowhere, even the soul of a bootblack will bound with emulation."--He has merely to push himself ahead and elbow his way to secure a ticket "in this immense lottery of popular luck, of preferment without merit, of success without talent, of apotheoses without virtues, of an infinity of places distributed by the people wholesale, and enjoyed by the people in detail."--Political charlatans flock thither from every quarters, those taking the lead who, being most in earnest, believe in the virtue of their nostrum, and need power to impose its recipe on the community; all being saviors, all places belong to them, and especially the highest. They lay siege to these conscientiously and philanthropically; if necessary, they will take them by assault, hold them through force, and, forcibly or otherwise, administer their cure-all to the human species. III.--Psychology of the Jacobin. His intellectual method.--Tyranny of formulae and suppression of facts.--Mental balance disturbed.--Signs of this in the revolutionary language.--Scope and expression of the Jacobin intellect.--In what respect his method is mischievous.--How it is successful.--Illusions produced by it. Such are our Jacobins, born out of social decomposition like mushrooms out of compost. Let us consider their inner organization, for they have one as formerly the Puritans; we have only to follow their dogma down to its depths, as with a sounding-line, to reach the psychological stratum in which the normal balance of faculty and sentiment is overthrown.