itician in Europe. In the same way it is startling to think that
within three years of the beheading of Lewis the Sixteenth, there was
probably not one serious republican in the representative assembly of
France. Yet it is always so. We might make just the same remark of the
House of Commons at Westminster in 1640, and of the Assembly of
Massachusetts or of New York as late as 1770. The final flash of a long
unconscious train of thought or intent is ever a surprise and a shock.
It is a mistake to set these swift changes down to political levity;
they were due rather to quickness of political intuition. It was the
King's attempt at flight in the summer of 1791 that first created a
republican party. It was that unhappy exploit, and no theoretical
preferences, that awoke France to the necessity of choosing between the
sacrifice of monarchy and the restoration of territorial aristocracy.

Political intuition was never one of Robespierre's conspicuous gifts.
But he had a doctrine that for a certain time served the same purpose.
Rousseau had kindled in him a fervid democratic enthusiasm, and had
penetrated his mind with the principle of the Sovereignty of the People.
This famous dogma contained implicitly within it the more indisputable
truth that a society ought to be regulated with a view to the happiness
of the people. Such a principle made it easier for Robespierre to
interpret rightly the first phases of the revolutionary movement. It
helped him to discern that the concentrated physical force of the
populace was the only sure protection against a civil war. And if a
civil war had broken out in 1789, instead of 1793, all the advantages of
authority would have been against the popular party. The first
insurrection of Paris is associated with the harangue of Camille
Desmoulins at the Palais Royal, with the fall of the Bastille, with the
murder of the governor, and a hundred other scenes of melodramatic
horror and the blood-red picturesque. The insurrection of the Fourteenth
of July 1789 taught Robespierre a lesson of practical politics, which
exactly fitted in with his previous theories. In his resentment against
the oppressive disorder of monarchy and feudalism, he had accepted the
counter principle that the people can do no wrong, and nobody of sense
now doubts that in their first great act the people of Paris did what
was right. Six days after the fall of the Bastille, the Centre were for
issuing a proclamation denouncing