ribunal,
which makes no declaration without evidence. Jean Julien has certainly
confessed; now what has he revealed?--On the following day, like a crop
of poisonous mushrooms, the growth of a single night, the story obtains
general credence. "Jean Julien has declared that all the prisons in
Paris thought as he did, that there would soon be fine times, that the
prisoners were armed, and that as soon as the volunteers cleared out
they would be let loose on all Paris."[3118] The streets are full of
anxious faces. "One says that Verdun had been betrayed like Longwy.
Others shook their heads and said it was the traitors within Paris and
not the declared enemies on the frontier that were to be feared."[3119]
On the following day the story grows: "There are royalist officers and
soldiers hidden away in Paris and in the outskirts. They are going to
open the prisons, arm the prisoners, set the King and his family free,
put the patriots in Paris to death, also the wives and children of those
in the army... Isn't it natural for men to look after the safety of
their wives and children, and to use the only efficient means to arrest
the assassin's dagger."[3120]--The working-class inferno has been
stirred up, now it's up to the contractors of public revolt to fan and
direct the flames.

III. Terror is their Salvation.

Rise of the homicidal idea among the leaders.--Their
situation.--The powers they seize.--Their pillage.--The
risks they run--Terror is their rescue.

They have been fanning the flames for a long time. Already, on the 11th
of August, the new Commune had announced, in a proclamation,[3121]
that "the guilty should perish on the scaffold," while its threatening
deputations force the national Assembly into the immediate institution
of a bloody tribunal. Carried into power by brutal force, it must
perish if it does not maintain itself, and this can be done only through
terror.--Let us pause and consider this unusual situation. Installed
in the Hotel-de-ville by a nightly surprise attack, about one hundred
strangers, delegated by a party which thinks or asserts itself to be the
peoples' delegates, have overthrown one of the two great powers of the
State, mangled and enslaved the other, and now rule in a capital of
700,000 souls, by the grace of eight or ten thousand fanatics and
cut-throats. Never did a radical change promote men from so low a point
and raise so high! The basest of newspaper scribblers