* Little does he care that nine out of ten electors do not vote: he regards himself as the authorized representative of all ten. * Little does he care whether the great majority of Frenchmen favor the Constitution of 1791; it is his business to impose on them his own. * Little does he care whether his former opponents, King, émigrés, unsworn ecclesiastics, are honorable men or at least excusable; he will launch against them every rigorous legal proceeding, transportation, confiscation, civil death and physical death.[3343] In his own eyes he is the justiciary, and his investiture is bestowed upon him by eternal right. There is no human infatuation so pernicious to man as that of absolute right; nothing is better calculated for the destruction in him of the hereditary accumulation of moral conceptions.--Within the narrow bounds of their creed, however, the Girondins are sincere and consistent. They are masters of their formulae; they know how to deduce consequences from them; they believe in them the same as a surveyor in his theorems, and a theologian in the articles of his faith; they are anxious to apply them, to devise a constitution, to establish a regular government, to emerge from a barbarous state, to put an end to fighting in the street, to pillaging, to murders, to the sway of brutal force and of naked arms. The disorder, mover, so repugnant to them as logicians is still more repugnant to them as cultivated, polished men. They have a sense of what is proper,[3344] of becoming ways, and their tastes are even refined. They are not familiar with, nor do they desire to imitate, the rude manners of Danton, his coarse language, his oaths, and his low associations with the people. They have not, like Robespierre, gone to lodge with a master joiner, to live him and eat with his family. Unlike Pache, Minister of War, no one among them "feels honored" by "going down to dine with his porter," and by sending his daughters to the club to give a fraternal kiss to drunken Jacobins.[3345] At Madame Roland's house there is a salon, although it is stiff and pedantic; Barbaroux send verses to a marchioness, who, after the 2nd of June, elopes with him to Caen.[3346] Condorcet has lived in high society, while his wife, a former canoness, possess the charms, the repose, the instruction, and the elegance of an accomplished woman. Men of this stamp cannot endure close alongside of them the inept and gross dictatorship of an armed rabble. In providing for the public treasury they require regular taxes and not tyrannical confiscations.[3347] To repress the malevolent they propose "punishment and not banishment."[3348] In all State trials they oppose irregular courts, and strive to maintain for those under indictment some of the usual safeguards.[3349] On declaring the King guilty they hesitate in pronouncing the sentence of death, and try to lighten their responsibility by appealing to the people. The line "laws