To the Jacobins of this epoch, as to those of our own days, this popular entity constitutes a superior personality possessing the attributes, peculiar to divinities, of never having to answer for its actions and never making a mistake. Its wishes must be humbly acceded. The people may kill, burn, ravage, commit the most frightful cruelties, glorify its hero to-day and throw him into the gutter to-morrow; it is all one; the politicians will not cease to vaunt its virtues, its high wisdom, and to bow to its every decision.[4] [4] These pretensions do at least seem to be growing untenable to the more advanced republicans. ``The rage with the socialists'' writes M. Clemenceau, ``is to endow with all the virtues, as though by a superhuman reason, the crowd whose reason cannot be much to boast of.'' The famous statesman might say more correctly that reason not only cannot be prominent in the crowd but is practically nonexistent. Now in what does this entity really consist, this mysterious fetich which revolutionists have revered for more than a century? It may be decomposed into two distinct categories. The first includes the peasants, traders, and workers of all sorts who need tranquillity and order that they may exercise their calling. This people forms the majority, but a majority which never caused a revolution. Living in laborious silence, it is ignored by the historians. The second category, which plays a capital part in all national disturbances, consists of a subversive social residue dominated by a criminal mentality. Degenerates of alcoholism and poverty, thieves, beggars, destitute ``casuals,'' indifferent workers without employment--these constitute the dangerous bulk of the armies of insurrection. The fear of punishment prevents many of them from becoming criminals at ordinary times, but they do become criminals as soon as they can exercise their evil instincts without danger. To this sinister substratum are due the massacres which stain all revolutions. It was this class which, guided by its leaders, continually invaded the great revolutionary Assemblies. These regiments of disorder had no other ideal than that of massacre, pillage, and incendiarism. Their indifference to theories and principles was complete. To the elements recruited from the lowest dregs of the populace are added, by way of contagion, a host of idle and indifferent persons who are simply drawn into the movement. They shout because there are men shouting, and revolt because there is a revolt, without having the vaguest idea of the cause of shouting or revolution. The suggestive power of their environment absolutely hypnotises them, and impels them to action.