popular violence and ordering rigorous
vigilance. Robespierre was then so little known in the Assembly that
even his name was usually misspelt in the journals. From his obscure
bench on the Mountain he cried out with bitter vehemence against the
proposed proclamation:--'Revolt! But this revolt is liberty. The battle
is not at its end. Tomorrow, it may be, the shameful designs against us
will be renewed; and who will there then be to repulse them, if
beforehand we declare the very men to be rebels, who have rushed to
arms for our protection and safety?' This was the cardinal truth of the
situation. Everybody knows Mirabeau's saying about Robespierre:--'That
man will go far: he believes every word that he says!' This is much, but
it is only half. It is not only that the man of power believes what he
says; what he believes must fit in with the facts and with the demands
of the time. Now Robespierre's firmness of conviction happened at this
stage to be rightly matched by his clearness of sight.

It is true that a passionate mob, its unearthly admixture of laughter
with fury, of vacancy with deadly concentration, is as terrible as some
uncouth antediluvian, or the unfamiliar monsters of the sea, or one of
the giant plants that make men shudder with mysterious fear. The history
of our own country in the eighteenth century tells of the riots against
meeting-houses in Doctor Sacheverell's time, and the riots against
papists and their abettors in Lord George Gordon's time, and
Church-and-King riots in Doctor Priestley's time. It would be too
daring, therefore, to maintain that the rabble of the poor have any more
unerring political judgment than the rabble of the opulent. But, in
France in 1789, Robespierre was justified in saying that revolt meant
liberty. If there had been no revolt in July, the court party would have
had time to mature their infatuated designs of violence against the
Assembly. In October these designs had come to life again. The royalists
at Versailles had exultant banquets, at which, in the presence of the
Queen, they drank confusion to all patriots, and trampled the new emblem
of freedom passionately underfoot. The news of this odious folly soon
travelled to Paris. Its significance was speedily understood by a
populace whose wits were sharpened by famine. Thousands of fire-eyed
women and men tramped intrepidly out towards Versailles. If they had
done less, the Assembly would have been dispersed or arbitrari