s, the clergy, the nobles, and the
parliamentarians; next the middle class of traders, manufacturers,
and the bourgeois; and finally the best of the inferior class, small
proprietors, farmers,[34168] and master-workmen--in short, the prominent
in every pursuit, profession, state, or occupation, whoever possesses
capital, a revenue, an establishment, respectability, public esteem,
education and mental and moral culture. The party in June, 1793, is
composed of little more than unreliable workmen, town and country
vagabonds, the habitues of hospices[34169], sluts of the gutter,
degraded and dangerous persons,[34170] the declasse, the corrupt, the
perverted, the maniacs of all sorts. In Paris, from which they command
the rest of France, their troop, an insignificant minority, is recruited
from that refuse of humanity infesting all capitals, amongst the
epileptic and scrofulous rabble which, heirs of vitiated blood and,
further degrading this by its misconduct, introduces into civilization
the degeneracy, imbecility, and infatuations of shattered temperaments,
retrograde instincts, and deformed brains.[34171] What it did with the
powers of the State is narrated by three or four contemporary witnesses;
we see it face to face, in itself, and in its chiefs, we contemplate the
true nature of the men of action and of enterprise who have led the last
attack and who represent it the best.

Since the 2nd of June "nearly one-half of the deputies in the Convention
refrain from taking any part in its deliberations; more than one
hundred and fifty have even fled or disappeared[34172]"; the silent,
the fugitives, the incarcerated, and the convicted, all this has been
accomplished by the party. On the evening of June 2nd its bosom friend,
its conscience, the filthy monstrosity, charlatan, monomaniac and
murderer, who regularly every morning, effuses his political poison into
its bosom, Marat, has at last obtained the discretionary powers craved
by him for the last four years, that of Marius and Sylla, that of
Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus; the power of adding or removing names
from lists of proscription:

"while the reading was going on he indicated cancellations or additions,
the secretary effacing or adding names as he suggested them, without any
consultation whatever with the Assembly."[34173]

At the Hotel-de-ville on the 3rd of June, in the Salle de la Reine,
Petion and Guadet, under arrest, see with their own eyes this Central
Co