ation sees untold treasures beyond the mists in which they are
shrouded. They can listen to a club harangue without falling asleep,
applaud its tirades in the rights place, offer a resolution in a public
garden, shout in the tribunes, pen affidavits for arrests, compose
orders-of-the-day for the national guard, and lend their lungs, arms,
and sabers to whoever bids for them. But here their capacity ends.
In this group merchants' and notaries' clerks abound, like Hebert and
Henriot, Vincent and Chaumette, butchers like Legendre, postmasters like
Drouet, boss-joiners like Duplay, school-teachers like that Buchot who
becomes a minister, and many others of the same sort, accustomed to
jotting down ideas, with vague notions of orthography and who are apt
in speech-making,[1204] foremen, sub-officers, former begging friars,
peddlers, tavern-keepers, retailers, market-porters, and city-journeymen
from Gouchon, the orator of the faubourg St. Antoine, down to Simon, the
cobbler of the Temple, from Trinchard, the juryman of the Revolutionary
Tribunal, down to grocers, tailors, shoemakers, tapster, waiters,
barbers, and other shopkeepers or artisans who do their work at home,
and who are yet to do the work of the September massacres. Add to these
the foul remnants of every popular insurrection and dictatorship, beasts
of prey like Jourdain of Avignon, and Fournier the American, women like
Theroigne, Rose Lacombe, and the tricoteuses of the Convention who have
unsexed themselves, the amnestied bandits and other gallows birds who,
for lack of a police, have a wide range, street-rollers and vagabonds,
rebels against labor and discipline, the whole of that class in the
center of civilization which preserves the instincts of savages, and
asserts the sovereignty of the people to glut a natural appetite for
license, laziness, and ferocity.--Thus is the party recruited through an
enlisting process that gleans its subjects from every station in life,
but which reaps them down in great swaths, and gathers them together
in the two groups to which dogmatism and presumption naturally belong.
Here, education has brought man to the threshold, even to the heart of
general ideas; consequently, he feels hampered within the narrow bounds
of his profession or occupation, and aspires to something beyond. But
as his education has remained superficial or rudimentary, consequently,
outside of his narrow circle he feels out of his place. He has a
perception