l, will he despoil to buy our suffrages? Will he
promise our soldiers, as the consuls promised the citizens of Rome, the
pillage of Spain or of Syria?_ No, assuredly; it is because we cannot be
an empire-nation that we shall remain a free nation.'[26] How few years,
alas, between this conclusive reasoning, and the pillage of Italy, the
campaign in Syria, the seizure of Spain!

Condorcet was not a member of the Assembly in whose formation and
composition he had taken so vivid and practical an interest. The first
political functions which he was invited to undertake were those of a
member of the municipality of Paris. In the tremendous drama of which
the scenes were now opening, the Town-hall of Paris was to prove itself
far more truly the centre of movement and action than the Constituent
Assembly. The efforts of the Constituent Assembly to build up were tardy
and ineffectual. The activity of the municipality of Paris in pulling
down was after a time ceaseless, and it was thoroughly successful. The
first mayor was the astronomer Bailly, Condorcet's defeated competitor
at the Academy. With the fall of the Bastille, summary hangings at the
nearest lantern-post, October insurrection of women, and triumphant and
bloody compulsion of king, queen, and Assembly to Paris from Versailles,
the two rivals, now colleagues, must have felt that the contests for
them were indeed no longer academic. The astronomy of the one and the
geometry of the other were for ever done with; and Condorcet's longing
for active political life in preference to mere study was gratified to
the very full.

Unhappily or not, the movement was beyond the control of anybody who,
like Condorcet, had no other force than that of disciplined reason and
principle. The Bastille no sooner fell, than the Revolution set in with
oceanic violence, in the face of which patriotic intention and
irrefragable arguments, even when both intention and arguments were
loyally revolutionary, were powerless to save the State. In crises of
this overwhelming kind, power of reasoning does not tell and mere
goodwill does not tell. Exaltation reaches a pitch at which the physical
sensibilities are so quickened as to be supreme over the rest of the
nature; and in these moods it is the man gifted with the physical
quality, as mysterious and indescribable as it is resistless, of a
Marat, to take a bad example, or a Danton, to take a good one, who can
'ride the whirlwind and direct the stor