reasts--quickly alarmed, ready to strike, ready for any act of
violence, blindly credulous, headlong and easily impelled, not merely
against real enemies on the outside, but at first against imaginary
enemies on the inside,[2381] but also against the King, the ministers,
the gentry, priests, parliamentarians, orthodox Catholics; against all
administrators and magistrates imprudent enough to have appealed to the
law; all manufacturers, merchants, and owners of property who condemn
disorder;the wealthy whose egotism keeps them at home; all those who are
well-off, well-bred and well-dressed.

They are all under suspicion because they have lost by the new regime,
or because they have not adopted its ways.--Such is the colossal brute
which the Girondins introduce into the political arena.[2382] For six
months they shake red flags before its eyes, goad it on, work it up into
a rage and drive it forward by decrees and proclamations,

* against their adversaries and against its keepers,

* against the nobles and the clergy,

* against aristocrats inside France in complicity with those of
Coblentz,

* against "the Austrian committee" the accomplice of Austria,

* against the King, whose caution they transform into treachery,

* against the whole government to which they impute the anarchy they
excite, and the war of which they themselves are the instigators.[2383]

Thus over-excited and topsy-turvy, the proletariat require only arms
and a rallying-point. The Girondins furnish both. Through a striking
coincidence, one which shows that the plan was concerted,[2384] they
start three political engines at the same time. Just at the moment when,
through their deliberate saber-rattling, they made war inevitable, they
invented popular insignia and armed the poor. At the end of January,
1792, almost during one week, they announced their ultimatum to Austria
using a fixed deadline, they adopted the red woolen cap and began the
manufacture of pikes.--It is evident that pikes are of no use in the
open field against cannon and a regular army; accordingly the are
intended for use in the interior and in towns. Let the national-guard
who can pay for his uniform, and the active citizen whose three francs
of direct tax gives him a privilege, own their guns; the stevedore, the
market-porter, the lodger, the passive citizen, whose poverty excludes
them from voting must have their pikes, and, in these insurrectionary
times, a ballot is not w