cal association is illegitimate
and null the moment you declare it to be so. You may even transform
religion. You are the fathers of the country. You have saved France, you
will regenerate humanity. The whole world looks on you in admiration;
finish your glorious work--forward, always forward."

Superior good sense and rooted convictions could alone stand firm
against this flood of seductions and solicitations; but vacillating and
ordinary men are carried away by it. In the harmony of applause which
rises, they do not hear the crash of the ruins they produce. In any
case, they stop their ears, and shun the cries of the oppressed; they
refuse to admit that their work could possibly bring about evil results;
they accept the sophisms and untruths which justify it; they allow the
assassinated to be calumniated in order to excuse the assassins; they
listen to Merlin de Douay, who, after three or four jacqueries, when
pillaging, arson, and murder are going on in all the provinces, has just
declared in the name of the Committee on Feudalism[2134] that "a law
must be presented to the people, the justice of which may enforce
silence on the feudatory egoists who, for the past six months, so
indecently protest against plunder; the wisdom of which may restore to
a sense of duty the peasant who has been led astray for a moment by
his resentment of a long oppression." And when Raynal, the surviving
patriarch of the philosophic party, one day, for a wonder, takes
the plain truth with him into their tribune, they resent his
straightforwardness as an outrage, and excuse it solely on the ground of
his imbecility. An omnipotent legislator cannot depreciate himself; like
a king he is condemned to self-admiration in his public capacity. "There
were not thirty deputies amongst us," says a witness, "who thought
differently from Raynal," but "in each other's presence the credit of
the Revolution, the perspective of its blessings, was an article of
faith which had to be believed in;" and, against their own reason,
against their conscience, the moderates, caught in the net of their own
acts, join the revolutionaries to complete the Revolution.

Had they refused, they would have been compelled; for, to obtain the
power, the Assembly has, from the very first, either tolerated
or solicited the violence of the streets. But, in accepting
insurrectionists for its allies, it makes them masters, and henceforth,
in Paris as in the provinces, illegal and