defend the section are off in the country; another third are hiding away
in their houses, and the other third dare not do anything."[3378]
"If, out of fifty thousand moderates, you can collect together three
thousand, I shall be very much astonished. And if; out of these three
thousand, five hundred only are found to agree, and have courage enough
to express their opinion, I shall be still more astonished. The latter,
for instance, must expect to be Septemberized!"[3379] This they know,
and hence they keep silent and bend beneath the yoke. "What, indeed,
would the majority of the sections do when it is demonstrated that a
dozen raving maniacs at the head of a sans-culottes section puts the
other forty-seven sections of Paris to flight?"--Through this desertion
of the state and themselves, they surrender in advance, and, in this
great city, as formerly in ancient Athens and Rome, we see alongside of
an immense population of subjects without any rights, a small despotic
oligarchy in itself composing the sovereign people.[3380]

VI.--Composition of the party.

Its numbers and quality decline.--The Underlings.--Idle and
dissipated workmen.--The suburban rabble.--Bandits and
blackguards.--Prostitutes.--The September actors.

Not that this minority has been on the increase since the 10th of
August, quite the reverse.--On the 19th of November, 1792, its candidate
for the office of Mayor of Paris, Lhuillier, obtains only 4,896
votes.[3381] On the 18th of June, 1793, its candidate for the command of
the National Guard, Henriot, will secure but 4,573 votes; to ensure his
election it will be necessary to cancel the election twice, impose the
open vote, and relieve voters from showing their section tickets,
which will permit the trusty to vote successively in other quarters and
apparently double their number by allowing each to vote two or three
times.[3382] Putting all together, there are not six thousand
Jacobins in Paris, all of them sans-culottes and partisans of the
"Mountain."[3383] Ordinarily, in a section assembly, they number "ten
or fifteen," at most "thirty or forty," "organized into a permanent
tyrannical board."... "The rest listen and raise their hands
mechanically."... "Three or four hundred Visionaries, whose devotion
is as frank as it is stupid, and two or three hundred more to whom the
result of the last revolution did not bring the places and honors they
too evidently relied on," form th