Thus, whilst other despots raise a moderate weight, calling around them either the majority or the flower of the nation, employing the best strength of the country and lengthening their lever (of despotism) as much as possible, the Jacobins attempt to raise an incalculable weight, repel the majority as well as the flower of the nation, discard the best strength of the country, and shorten their lever to the utmost. They hold on only to the shorter end, the rough, clumsy, iron-bound, creaking and grinding extremity, that is to say, to physical force,--the means for physical constraint, the heavy hand of the gendarme on the shoulder of the suspect, the jailer's bolts and keys turned on the prisoner, the club used by the sans-culottes on the back of the bourgeois to quicken his pace, and, better still, the Septembriseur's pike thrust into the aristocrat's belly, and the blade falling on the neck held fast in the clutches of the guillotine.--Such, henceforth, is the only machinery they posses for governing the country, for they have deprived themselves of all other. Their engine has to be exhibited, for it works only on condition that its bloody image be stamped indelibly on every body's imagination; if the Negro monarch or the pasha desires to see heads bowing as he passes along, he must be escorted by executioners. They must abuse their engine because fear losing its effect through habit, needs example to keep it alive; the Negro monarch or the pasha who would keep the fear alive by which he rules, must be stimulated every day; he must slaughter too many to be sure of slaughtering enough; he must slaughter constantly, in heaps, indiscriminately, haphazard, no matter for what offense, on the slightest suspicion, the innocent along with the guilty. He and his are lost the moment they cease to obey this rule. Every Jacobin, like every African monarch or pasha, must it that he may be and remain at the head of his band.--That is the reason why the chiefs of the party, its natural and pre-determined leaders, are theoreticians able to grasp its principle and logicians capable of drawing its consequences. They are, however, so inept as to be unable to understand that their enterprise exceeds both their own and all other human resources, but shrewd enough to see that brutal force is their only tool, inhuman enough to apply it unscrupulously and without reserve, and perverted enough to murder at random in order to disseminate terror. ***** [Footnote 2201: Buchez et Roux, XXXII, 354. (Speech by Robespierre in the Convention, Floréal 18, year II.) "Sparta gleams like a flash of lightening amidst profoundest darkness".] [Footnote 2202: Milos taken by the Athenians; Thebes, after Alexander's victory; Corinth, after its capture by the Romans.--In the Peloponnesian war, the Plateans, who surrender at discretion, are put to death. Nicias is murdered in cold blood after his defeat in Sicily. The prisoners at oegos-Potamos have their thumbs cut off.]