p. 4. "Robespierre was
one day eulogizing a man named Desfieux, well known for his lack of
integrity, and whom he finally sacrificed. 'But, I said to him, your man
Desfieux is known to be a rascal.'--'No matter,' he replied, 'he is
a good patriot.'--'But he is a fraudulent bankrupt.'-'He is a good
patriot.'--'But he is a thief.'--'He is a good patriot.' I could not get
more than these three words out of him."]

CHAPTER II.

I.--Formation of the party.

Its recruits--These are rare in the upper class and amongst
the masses.--They are numerous in the low bourgeois class
and in the upper stratum of the people.--The position and
education which enroll a man in the party.

Personalities like these are found in all classes of society; no
situation or position in life protects one from wild Utopia or frantic
ambition. We find among the Jacobins a Barras and a Chateauneuf-Randon,
two nobles of the oldest families; Condorcet, a marquis, mathematician,
philosopher and member of two renowned academies; Gobel, bishop of Lydda
and suffragan to the bishop of Bale; Herault de Sechellles, a protege of
the Queen's and attorney-general to the Paris parliament; Lepelletier de
St. Fargeau, chief-justice and one of the richest land-owners in France;
Charles de Hesse, major-general, born in the royal family; and, last of
all, a prince of the blood and fourth personage in the realm, the Duke
of Orleans.--But, with the exception of these rare deserters, neither
the hereditary aristocracy nor the upper magistracy, nor the highest of
the middle class, none of the land-owners who live on their estates, or
the leaders of industrial and commercial enterprises, no one belonging
to the administration, none of those, in general, who are or deserve to
be considered social authorities, furnish the party with recruits. All
have too much at stake in the political establishment, shattered as it
is, to wish its entire demolition. Their political experience, brief as
it is, enables them to see at once that a habitable house is not built
by merely tracing a plan of it on paper according the theorems of school
geometry.--On the other hand, among the ordinary rural population the
ideology finds, unless it can be changed into a legend, no listeners.
Share croppers, small holders and farmers looking after their own plots
of ground, peasants and craftsmen who work too hard to think and whose
minds never range beyond a village h