at this moment becomes incalculable: it would be easier to raise a mountain, and, just at this moment, the Jacobins have deprived themselves of every moral force through which a political engineer acts on human wills. Unlike Philip II. and Louis XIV. they are not supported by the intolerance of a vast majority, for, instead of fifteen or twenty orthodox against one heretic, they count in their church scarcely more than one orthodox against fifteen or twenty heretics.[2221]--They are not, like legitimate sovereigns, supported by the stubborn loyalty of an entire population, following in the steps of its chieftain out of the prestige of hereditary right and through habits of ancient fealty. On the contrary, their reign is only a day old and they themselves are interlopers. At first installed by a coup d'état and afterwards by the semblance of an election, they have extorted or obtained by trick the suffrages through which they act. They are so familiar with fraud and violence that, in their own Assembly, the ruling minority has seized and held on to power by violence and fraud, putting down the majority by riots, and the departments by force of arms. To give their brutalities the semblance of right, they improvise two pompous demonstrations, first, the sudden manufacture of a paper constitution, which molders away in their archives, and next, the scandalous farce of a hollow and compulsory plebiscite.--A dozen leaders of the party concentrate unlimited authority in their own hands; but, as admitted by them, their authority is derivative; it is the Convention which makes them its delegates; their precarious title has to be renewed monthly; a turn of the majority may sweep them and their work away to-morrow; an insurrection of the people, whom they have familiarized with insurrection, may to-morrow sweep them away, their work and their majority.--They maintain only a disputed, limited and transient ascendancy over their adherents. They are not military chieftains like Cromwell and Napoleon, generals of an army obeyed without a murmur, but common stump-speakers at the mercy of an audience that sits in judgment on them. There is no discipline in this public; every Jacobin remains independent by virtue of his principles; if he accepts leaders, it is with a reservation of their worth to him; selecting them as he pleases, he is free to change them when he pleases; his trust in them is intermittent, his loyalty provisional, and, as his adhesion depends on a mere preference, he always reserves the right to discard the favorite of to-day as he has discarded the favorite of yesterday. In this audience, there is no such thing as subordination; the lowest demagogue, any noisy subaltern, a Hébert or Jacques Roux, aspiring to step out of the ranks, overbidding the charlatans in office in order to obtain their places. Even with a complete and lasting ascendancy over an organized band of docile supporters, the Jacobin leaders would be feeble for lack of