kely to prevail. As publicists and orators they had no
rivals in the Convention. They had with them, beyond all doubt, the
great majority both of the deputies and of the French nation. These
advantages, it should seem, ought to have decided the event of the
struggle. But the opposite party had compensating advantages of a
different kind. The chiefs of the Mountain, though not eminently
distinguished by eloquence or knowledge, had great audacity, activity,
and determination. The Convention and France were against them; but the
mob of Paris, the clubs of Paris, and the municipal government of Paris,
were on their side.

The policy of the Jacobins, in this situation, was to subject France to
an aristocracy infinitely worse than that aristocracy which had
emigrated with the Count of Artois--to an aristocracy not of birth, not
of wealth, not of education, but of mere locality. They would not hear
of privileged orders: but they wished to have a privileged city. That
twenty-five millions of Frenchmen should be ruled by a hundred thousand
gentlemen and clergymen was insufferable; but that twenty-five millions
of Frenchmen should be ruled by a hundred thousand Parisians was as it
should be. The qualification of a member of the new oligarchy was simply
that he should live near the hall where the Convention met, and should
be able to squeeze himself daily into the gallery during a debate, and
now and then to attend with a pike for the purpose of blockading the
doors. It was quite agreeable to the maxims of the Mountain that a score
of draymen from Santerre's brewery, or of devils from Hebert's
printing-house, should be permitted to drown the voices of men
commissioned to speak the sense of such cities as Marseilles, Bordeaux,
and Lyons; and that a rabble of half-naked porters from the Faubourg St.
Antoine should have power to annul decrees for which the representatives
of fifty or sixty departments had voted. It was necessary to find some
pretext for so odious and absurd a tyranny. Such a pretext was found. To
the old phrases of liberty and equality were added the sonorous
watchwords, unity and indivisibility. A new crime was invented, and
called by the name of federalism. The object of the Girondists, it was
asserted, was to break up the great nation into little independent
commonwealths, bound together only by a league like that which connects
the Swiss Cantons or the United States of America. The great obstacle in
the way of th