of government business has given them some insights. In short,
the consciences of six hundred and fifty deputies are only in part
perverted.

They are all, unquestionably, decided republicans, enemies of tradition,
apostles of reason, and trained in deductive politics; only on these
conditions could they be elected. Every candidate is supposed to possess
the Jacobin faith, or, at least, to recite the revolutionary creed. The
Convention, consequently, at its opening session votes unanimously, with
cheers and enthusiasm, the abolition of royalty, and three months later
it pronounces, by a large majority, Louis XVI.,

"guilty of conspiring against the liberty of the nation, and of assaults
on the general welfare of the State."[3332]

Nevertheless, social habitudes still subsist under political prejudices.
A man who is born in and lives for a long time in an old community, is,
through this alone, marked with its imprint; the customs to which he
conforms have crystallized in him in the shape of sentiments: if it is
well-regulated and civilized, he has involuntarily arrived at respect
for property and for human life, and, in most characters, this respect
has taken very deep root. A theory, even if adopted, does not wholly
succeed in destroying this respect; only in rare instances is it
successful, when it encounters coarse and defective natures; to
take full hold, it is necessary that it should fall on the scattered
inheritors of former destructive appetites, on those hopelessly
degenerate souls in which the passions of an anterior date are
slumbering; then only does its malevolence fully appear, for it rouses
the ferocious or plundering instincts of the barbarian, the raider, the
inquisitor, and the pasha. On the contrary, with the greatest number,
do what it will, integrity and humanity always remain powerful motives.
Nearly all these legislators, who originate in the middle class, are at
bottom, irrespective of a momentary delusion, what they always have been
up to now, advocates, attorneys, merchants, priests, or physicians
of the ancient regime, and what they will become later on, docile
administrators or zealous functionaries of Napoleon's empire,[3333] that
is to say, ordinary civilized persons belonging to the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, sufficiently honest in private life to have a
desire to be equally so in public life.--Hence their horror of anarchy,
of Marat,[3334] and of the September butchers and robb