s shared the holy vindictiveness of their pastors.
Immense material improvements had been made, but who was to guard them
against all these powerful and exasperated bands? No chamber could
execute so portentous an office, least of all a chamber that was bound
to work in accord with a King, who at the very moment when he was
swearing fidelity to the new order of things, was sending entreaties to
the King of Prussia and to the Emperor, his brother-in-law, to overthrow
the new order and bring back the old. If the Revolution had achieved
priceless gains for France, they could only be preserved on condition
that public action was directed by those who valued these gains for
themselves and for their children above all things else--above the
monarchy, above the constitution, above peace, above their own sorry
lives. There was only one party who showed this passionate devotion,
this fanatical resolution not to suffer the work that had been done to
be undone, and never to allow France to sink back from exalted national
life into the lethargy of national death. That party was the Jacobins,
and, above all, the austere and rigorous Jacobins of Paris. On their
ascendancy depended the triumph of the Revolution, and on the triumph of
the Revolution depended the salvation of France. Their ascendancy meant
a Jacobin dictatorship, and against this, as against dictatorship in all
its forms, many things have been said, and truly said. But the one most
important thing that can be said about Jacobin dictatorship is that, in
spite of all the dolorous mishaps and hateful misdeeds that marked its
course, it was still the only instrument capable of concentrating and
utilising the dispersed social energy of the French people. The crisis
was not a crisis of logic but of force, and the Jacobins alone
understood, as the old Covenanters had understood, that problems of
force are not solved by phrases, but by mastery and the sword.

The great popular club of Paris was the centre of all those who looked
at events in this spirit. The Legislative Assembly, the successor of the
Constituent, met in the month of October 1791. Like its predecessor, the
Legislative contained a host of excellent and patriotic men, and they at
once applied themselves to the all-important task, which the Constituent
had left so deplorably incomplete, of finally breaking down the old
feudal rights. The most important group in the new chamber were the
deputies from the Gironde. Eve