n
subject to the arbitrariness of the lowest class. Nearly all the higher
administrative bodies, seventy-five of the department directories,[2602]
give in their adhesion to Lafayette's letter, or respond by supporting
the proclamation, so noble and so moderate, in which the King,
recounting the violence done to him, maintains his legal rights with
mournful, inflexible gentleness. Many of the towns, large and small,
thank him for his firmness, the addresses being signed by "the notables
of the place,"[2603] chevaliers of St. Louis, former officials, judges
and district-administrators, physicians, notaries, lawyers, recorders,
post-masters, manufacturers, merchants, people who are settled down, in
short the most prominent and the most respected men. At Paris, a similar
petition, drawn up by two former Constituents, contains 247 pages of
signatures attested by 99 notaries.[2604] Even in the council-general
of the commune a majority is in favor of publicly censuring the mayor
Petion, the syndic-attorney Manuel, and the police administrators Panis,
Sergent, Viguer, and Perron.[2605] On the evening of June 20th, the
department council orders an investigation; it follows this up; it
urges it on; it proves by authentic documents the willful inaction, the
hypocritical connivance, the double-dealing of the syndic-attorney and
the mayor;[2606] it suspends both from their functions, and cites them
before the courts as well as Santerre and his accomplices. Lafayette,
finally, adding to the weight of his opinion the influence of his
presence, appears at the bar of the National Assembly and demands
"effectual" measures against the usurpations of the Jacobin sect,
insisting that the instigators of the riot of the 20th of June
be punished "as guilty of lese-nation." As a last and still more
significant symptom, his proceedings are approved of in the Assembly by
a majority of more than one hundred votes.[2607]

All this must and will be crushed out. For on the side of the
Constitutionalists, whatever they may be, whether King, deputies,
ministers, generals, administrators, notables or national-guards, the
will to act evaporates in words; and the reason is, they are civilized
beings, long accustomed to the ways of a regular community, interested
from father to son in keeping the law, disconcerted at the thought of
consequences, upset by multifaceted ideas, unable to comprehend that, in
the state of nature to which France has reverted, but