as
his flow of words, showered upon his hearers, proves to them that every
capacity and every right are naturally and legitimately theirs.

"When that man opened his mouth," says a cold-blooded witness, "we were
sure of being inundated with quotations and maxims, often apropos of
street lamp posts, or of the stall of a herb-dealer. His stentorian
voice made the vaults ring; and after he had spoken for two hours,
and his breath was completely exhausted, the admiring and enthusiastic
shouts which greeted him amounted almost to frenzy. Thus the orator
fancied himself a Mirabeau, while the spectators imagined themselves the
Constituent Assembly, deciding the fate of France."

The journals and pamphlets are written in the same style. Every brain
is filled with the fumes of conceit and of big words; the leader of the
crowd is he who raves the most, and he guides the wild enthusiasm which
he increases.

Let us consider the most popular of these chiefs; they are the green or
the dry fruit of literature, and of the bar. The newspaper is the
stall which every morning offers them for sale, and if they suit the
overexcited public it is simply owing to their acid or bitter flavor.
Their empty, unpracticed minds are wholly void of political conceptions;
they have no capacity or practical experience. Desmoulins is twenty-nine
years of age, Loustalot twenty-seven, and their intellectual ballast
consists of college reminiscences, souvenirs of the law schools, and the
common-places picked up in the houses of Raynal and his associates.
As to Brissot and Marat, who are ostentatious humanitarians, their
knowledge of France and of foreign countries consists in what they have
seen through the dormer windows of their garrets, and through utopian
spectacles. In minds like these, empty or led astray, the Contrat-Social
could not fail to become a gospel; for it reduces political science to
a strict application of an elementary axiom which relieves them of all
study, and hands society over to the caprice of the people, or, in other
words, delivers it into their own hands.--Hence they demolish all
that remains of social institutions, and push on equalization until
everything is brought down to the same level.

"With my principles," writes Desmoulins,[1419] "is associated the
satisfaction of putting myself where I belong, of showing my strength to
those who have despised me, of lowering to my level all whom fortune has
placed above me: my motto