their nostrum, and need power to impose its recipe on the community; all
being saviors, all places belong to them, and especially the highest.
They lay siege to these conscientiously and philanthropically; if
necessary, they will take them by assault, hold them through force, and,
forcibly or otherwise, administer their cure-all to the human species.

III.--Psychology of the Jacobin.

His intellectual method.--Tyranny of formulae and
suppression of facts.--Mental balance disturbed.--Signs of
this in the revolutionary language.--Scope and expression of
the Jacobin intellect.--In what respect his method is
mischievous.--How it is successful.--Illusions produced by
it.

Such are our Jacobins, born out of social decomposition like mushrooms
out of compost. Let us consider their inner organization, for they have
one as formerly the Puritans; we have only to follow their dogma down to
its depths, as with a sounding-line, to reach the psychological stratum
in which the normal balance of faculty and sentiment is overthrown.

When a statesman, who is not wholly unworthy of that great name, finds
an abstract principle in his way, as, for instance, that of popular
sovereignty, he accepts it, if he accepts it at all, according to
his conception of its practical bearings. He begins, accordingly, by
imagining it applied and in operation. From personal recollections and
such information as he can obtain, he forms an idea of some village or
town, some community of moderate size in the north, in the south, or
in the center of the country, for which he has to make laws. He then
imagines its inhabitants acting according to his principle, that is to
say, voting, mounting guard, levying taxes, and administering their
own affairs. Familiar with ten or a dozen groups of this sort, which he
regards as examples, he concludes by analogy as to others and the rest
on the territory. Evidently it is a difficult and uncertain process; to
be exact, or nearly so, requires rare powers of observation and, at each
step, a great deal of tact, for a nice calculation has to be made on
given quantities imperfectly ascertained and imperfectly noted![1115]
Any political leader who does this successfully, does it through the
ripest experience associated with genius. And even then he keeps his
hand on the check-rein in pushing his innovation or reform; he is
almost always tentative; he applies his law only in part, graduall