thus actually ends in a dictatorship
of the few, and a proscription of the many. Outside of the sect you are
outside of the laws. We, the five or six thousand Jacobins of Paris,
are the legitimate monarch, the infallible Pontiff, and woe betide the
refractory and the lukewarm, all government agents, all private persons,
the clergy, the nobles, the rich, merchants, traders, the indifferent
among all classes, who, steadily opposing or yielding uncertain
adhesion, dare to throw doubt on our unquestionable right.

One by one these consequences are to come into light, and it is evident
that, let the logical machinery by which they unfold themselves be what
it may, no ordinary person, unless of consummate vanity, will fully
adopt them. He must have an exalted opinion of himself to consider
himself sovereign otherwise than by his vote, to conduct public business
with no more misgivings than his private business, to directly and
forcibly interfere with this, to set himself up, he and his clique, as
guides, censors and rulers of his government, to persuade himself that,
with his mediocre education and average intellect, with his few
scraps of Latin and such information as is obtained in reading-rooms,
coffee-houses, and newspapers, with no other experience than that of a
club, or a municipal council, he could discourse wisely and well on the
vast, complex questions which superior men, specially devoted to them,
hesitate to take up. At first this presumption existed in him only
in germ, and, in ordinary times, it would have remained, for lack of
nourishment, as dry-rot or creeping mold, But the heart knows not
what strange seeds it contains! Any of these, feeble and seemingly
inoffensive, needs only air and sunshine to become a noxious excrescence
and a colossal plant. Whether third or fourth rate attorney, counselor,
surgeon, journalist, cure, artist, or author, the Jacobin is like the
shepherd that has just found, in one corner of his hut, a lot of old
parchments which entitle him to the throne. What a contrasts between the
meanness of his calling and the importance with which the theory invests
him! With what rapture he accepts a dogma that raises him so high in
his own estimation! Diligently conning the Declaration of Rights,
the Constitution, all the official documents that confer on him
such glorious prerogatives, charging his imagination with them, he
immediately assumes a tone befitting his new position.[1123]--Nothing
su