he press, leaders of the populace,
such as Santerre and Legendre, and above them all, the Alsatian
soldier, Westermann.

With Danton and his following we reach the lowest stage of what can
still be called the conflict of opinion, and come to bare cupidity and
vengeance, to brutal instinct and hideous passion. All these elements
were very near the surface in former phases of the Revolution. At this
point they are about to prevail, and the man of action puts himself
forward in the place of contending theorists. Robespierre and Brissot
were politicians who did not shrink from crime, but it was in the
service of some form of the democratic system. Even Marat, the most
ghastly of them all, who demanded not only slaughter but torture, and
whose ferocity was revolting and grotesque, even Marat was obedient to
a logic of his own. He adopted simply the state of nature and the
primitive contract, in which thousands of his contemporaries believed.
The poor had agreed to renounce the rights of savage life and the
prerogative of force, in return for the benefits of civilisation; but
finding the compact broken on the other side, finding that the upper
classes governed in their own interest, and left them to misery and
ignorance, they resumed the conditions of barbaric existence before
society, and were free to take what they required, and to inflict
what punishment they chose upon men who had made a profit of their
sufferings. Danton was only a strong man, who wished for a strong
government in the interest of the people, and in his own. In point of
doctrine, he cared for little but the relief of the poor by taxing the
rich. He had no sympathy with the party that was gathering in the
background, whose aim it was not only to reduce inequalities, but to
institute actual equality and the social level. There was room beyond
for more extreme developments of the logic of democracy; but the
greatest change in the modern world was wrought by Danton, for it was
he who overthrew the Monarchy and made the Republic.

When Lewis dismissed his ministers, Danton exclaimed that the time had
come to strike terror, and on June 20 he fulfilled his threat. It was
the anniversary of the Tennis Court. A monster demonstration was
organised, to plant a tree of liberty or to present a petition--in
reality to overawe the Assembly and the king. There was an expectation
that the king would perish in the tumult, but nothing definite was
settled, and no assassin