aire than I am."
Carnot[34185] does even more than this: he gives up his honor when,
with his colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety, Billaud-Varennes,
Couthon, Saint-Just, Robespierre, he puts his name to decrees which are
assassinations. A similar devotion brings recruits into the armies
by hundreds of thousands, bourgeois[34186] and peasants, from the
volunteers of 1791 to the levies of 1793; and the latter class fight not
only for France, but also, and more than all, for the Revolution. For,
now that the sword is drawn, the mutual and growing exasperation leaves
only the extreme parties in the field. Since the 10th of August, and
more especially since the 21st of January, it has no longer been a
question how to deal with the ancient regime, of cutting away its
dead portions or its troublesome thorns, of accommodating it to modern
requirements, of establishing civil equality, a limited monarchy, a
parliamentary government. The question is how to escape conquest by
armed force to avert the military executions of Brunswick,[34187] the
vengeance of the proscribed emigres, the restoration and the aggravation
of the old feudal and fiscal order of things. Both through their
traditions and their experience, the mass of the country people hate
this ancient order, and with all the accumulated hatred which an
unceasing and secular spoliation has caused. Irrespective of costs, the
rural masses will never again suffer the tax-collector among them, nor
the excise man in the cellar, nor the fiscal agent on the frontier. For
them the ancient regime is nothing more than these things; and, in fact,
they have paid no taxes, or scarcely any, since the beginning of
the Revolution. On this matter the people's idea is fixed, positive,
unalterable; and as soon as they perceive in the distant future the
possible re-establishment of the taille, the tithe, and the seignorial
rights, they choose their side; they will fight to the death.--As to the
artisans and lesser bourgeois, their spur is the magnificent prospect of
careers, to which the doors are thrown open, of unbounded advancement,
of promotion offered to merit; more than all, their illusions are still
intact.

Camped out there, facing the enemy, those noble ideals, which in the
hands of the Parisian demagogues had turned into sanguinary harlots,
remain pure and virginal in the minds of the soldiers and their
officers. Liberty, equality, the rights of man, the reign of reason--all