anagement
(Directoire de Departmente) it is found advisable to retain what Taxes
you can gather, to pay your own inevitable expenditures. Our Revenue is
Assignats; emission on emission of Paper-money. And the Army; our
Three grand Armies, of Rochambeau, of Luckner, of Lafayette? Lean,
disconsolate hover these Three grand Armies, watching the Frontiers
there; three Flights of long-necked Cranes in moulting time;--wretched,
disobedient, disorganised; who never saw fire; the old Generals and
Officers gone across the Rhine. War-minister Narbonne, he of the
rose-coloured Reports, solicits recruitments, equipments, money, always
money; threatens, since he can get none,--to 'take his sword,' which
belongs to himself, and go serve his country with that. (Moniteur,
Seance du 23 Janvier, 1792; Biographie des Ministres para Narbonne.)

The question of questions is: What shall be done? Shall we, with a
desperate defiance which Fortune sometimes favours, draw the sword
at once, in the face of this in-rushing world of Emigration and
Obscurantism; or wait, and temporise and diplomatise, till, if possible,
our resources mature themselves a little? And yet again are our
resources growing towards maturity; or growing the other way? Dubious:
the ablest Patriots are divided; Brissot and his Brissotins, or
Girondins, in the Legislative, cry aloud for the former defiant plan;
Robespierre, in the Jacobins, pleads as loud for the latter dilatory
one: with responses, even with mutual reprimands; distracting the Mother
of Patriotism. Consider also what agitated Breakfasts there may be at
Madame d'Udon's in the Place Vendome! The alarm of all men is great.
Help, ye Patriots; and O at least agree; for the hour presses. Frost was
not yet gone, when in that 'tolerably handsome apartment of the Castle
of Niort,' there arrived a Letter: General Dumouriez must to Paris. It
is War-minister Narbonne that writes; the General shall give counsel
about many things. (Dumouriez, ii. c. 6.) In the month of February 1792,
Brissotin friends welcome their Dumouriez Polymetis,--comparable
really to an antique Ulysses in modern costume; quick, elastic, shifty,
insuppressible, a 'many-counselled man.'

Let the Reader fancy this fair France with a whole Cimmerian Europe
girdling her, rolling in on her; black, to burst in red thunder of War;
fair France herself hand-shackled and foot-shackled in the weltering
complexities of this Social Clothing, or Constitution, whic