th
the public forces, because "it would be arming one body of citizens
against another."[2663]--Every support is evidently knocked away.
Feeling that it is abandoned, the National Assembly gives up, and, as
a last expedient, and with a degree of weakness or simplicity which
admirably depicts the legislators of the epoch, it adopts a philosophic
address to the people, "instructing it what to do in the exercise of its
sovereignty."

How this is done, it may see the next morning. At 7 o'clock, a Jacobin
deputy stops in a cab before the door of the Feuillants club; a crowd
gathers around him, and he gives his name, Delmas. The crowd understood
it as Dumas, a well-known Constitutionalist, and, in a rage, drag him
out of the vehicle and knock him down; had not other deputies run up and
given assurances that he was the patriot Delmas, of Toulouse, instead
of "the traitor, Mathieu Dumas," he was a lost man.[2664] Dumas makes
no effort to enter. He finds on the Place Vendome a second and not less
instructive warning. Some wretches, followed by the usual rabble, carry
about a number of heads on pikes, those probably of the journalist
Suleau, and three others, massacred a quarter of an hour before; "boys
quite young, mere children, play with these heads by tossing them in the
air, and catching them on the ends of their sticks."--There is no doubt
but that the deputies of the "Right" and even the "Center," would do
well to go home and stay there. In fact, they are no longer seen in the
Assembly.[2665] In the afternoon, out of the 630 members still present
the evening before, 346 do not answer the call, while about
thirty others, had either withdrawn before this or sent in their
resignations.[2666] The purging is complete, like that to which
Cromwell, in 1648, subjected the Long Parliament. Henceforth the
Legislative body, reduced to 224 Jacobins or Girondins, with 60
frightened or tractable neutrals, will obey the orders of the street
without any difficulty. A change has come over the spirit of the body
as well as over its composition; it is nothing more now than a servile
instrument in the hands of the seditious, who have mutilated it, and
who, masters of it through a first misdeed, are going to use it to
legalize other crimes.

VI.--Nights of August 9 and 10.

The sections.--Commissioners of the sections at the Hotel-
de-ville.--The revolutionary Commune is substituted for the
legal Commune.

During the