is the price of self-sacrifice, it is
the idealist who comes to the front, and as the nineteenth-century
prophet Mazzini taught, men will lay down their lives for principles
but not for interests.

Let us not forget that it was the Jacobin minority who in the heat and
glow of their convictions saved the people of France. Led astray by
their old guides, abandoned in a dark and trackless waste, their heads
girt with horror, menaced by destruction on every side, the people
groped, wandering hither and thither seeking an outlet in vain. At
length a voice was heard, confidant, thrilling as a trumpet call; "Lo
this is the way! follow, and ye shall emerge and conquer!" It may not
have been the best way, but it was _a_ way and they followed.

It is easy enough to pour scorn on the _Contrat Social_ as a political
philosophy, but an ideal, a faith, a dogma are necessary to evoke
enthusiasm, the contempt of material things and of death itself. These
the _Contrat Social_ gave. It defined with absolute precision the
principles latent in the movement of reform that broke up mediaevalism.
Does power descend from God, its primeval source; or does it ascend,
delegated from the people? Once stated, the French mind with its
intense lucidity and logicality saw the line of cleavage between old
and new--divine right: or sovereignty of the people--and bade all men
choose where they would stand. The _Contrat Social_ with its consuming
passion for social justice, its ideal of a state founded on the
sovereignty of the people, became the gospel of the time. Men and
women conned its pages by heart and slept with the book under their
pillows. Napoleon himself in his early Jacobin days was saturated with
its doctrines, and in later times astutely used its phrases as
shibboleths to cloak his acts of despotism. But in that terrible
revolutionary decade the Jacobins had spent their lives and their
energies. A profound weariness of the long and severe tension, and a
yearning for a return to orderly civil life came over men's minds. The
masses were still sincerely attached to the Catholic faith: the
middle-classes hailed with relief the advent of the strong man who
proved himself able to crush faction; the peasants were won by a
champion of the Revolution who made impossible the return of the
_aides_, the _tailles_, the _gabelles_, and all the iniquitous
oppressions of the _ancien regime_ and guaranteed them the possession
of the confiscated _emigre_