become accomplished outrages. On the denunciation of a domestic who has
listened at a door, on the gossip of a washerwoman who has found a scrap
of paper in a dressing-gown, on the false interpretation of a letter,
on vague indications which it completes and patches together by
the strength of its imagination, it forges a coup d'etat, makes
examinations, domiciliary visits, nocturnal surprises and arrests;[2150]
it exaggerates, blackens, and comes in public session to denounce the
whole affair to the National Assembly. First comes the plot of the
Breton nobles to deliver Brest to the English;[2151] then the plot for
hiring brigands to destroy the crops; then the plot of 14th of July to
burn Paris; then the plot of Favras to murder Lafayette, Necker, and
Bailly; then the plot of Augeard to carry off the King, and many others,
week after week, not counting those which swarm in the brains of the
journalists, and which Desmoulins, Freron, and Marat reveal with a
flourish of trumpets in each of their publications.

"All these alarms are cried daily in the streets like cabbages
and turnips, the good people of Paris inhaling them along with the
pestilential vapors of our mud."[2152]

..............Now, in this aspect, as well as in a good many others, the
Assembly is the people; satisfied that it is in danger,[2153] it makes
laws as the former make their insurrections, and protects itself by
strokes of legislation as the former protects itself by blows with
pikes. Failing to take hold of the motor spring by which it might direct
the government machine, it distrusts all the old and all the new wheels.
The old ones seem to it an obstacle, and, instead of utilizing them,
it breaks them one by one--parliaments, provincial states, religious
orders, the church, the nobles, and royalty. The new ones are
suspicious, and instead of harmonizing them, it puts them out of gear
in advance--the executive power, administrative powers, judicial
powers, the police, the gendarmerie, and the army.[2154] Thanks to
these precautions it is impossible for any of them to be turned against
itself; but, also, thanks to these precautions, none of them can perform
their functions.[2155]

In building, as well as in destroying, the Assembly had two bad
counselors, on the one hand fear, on the other hand theory; and on the
ruins of the old machine which it had demolished without discernment,
the new machine, which it has constructed without forecast, wi