re, as well
as of habit and prejudice,--when you separate the common sort of men
from their proper chieftains, so as to form them into an adverse
army,--I no longer know that venerable object called the people in such
a disbanded race of deserters and vagabonds. For a while they may be
terrible, indeed,--but in such a manner as wild beasts are terrible. The
mind owes to them no sort of submission. They are, as they have always
been reputed, rebels. They may lawfully be fought with, and brought
under, whenever an advantage offers. Those who attempt by outrage and
violence to deprive men of any advantage which they hold under the
laws, and to destroy the natural order of life, proclaim war against
them.

We have read in history of that furious insurrection of the common
people in France called the _Jacquerie_: for this is not the first time
that the people have been enlightened into treason, murder, and rapine.
Its object was to extirpate the gentry. The Captal de Buch, a famous
soldier of those days, dishonored the name of a gentleman and of a man
by taking, for their cruelties, a cruel vengeance on these deluded
wretches: it was, however, his right and his duty to make war upon them,
and afterwards, in moderation, to bring them to punishment for their
rebellion; though in the sense of the French Revolution, and of some of
our clubs, they were the _people_,--and were truly so, if you will call
by that appellation _any majority of men told by the head_.

At a time not very remote from the same period (for these humors never
have affected one of the nations without some influence on the other)
happened several risings of the lower commons in England. These
insurgents were certainly the majority of the inhabitants of the
counties in which they resided; and Cade, Ket, and Straw, at the head of
their national guards, and fomented by certain traitors of high rank,
did no more than exert, according to the doctrines of ours and the
Parisian societies, the sovereign power inherent in the majority.

We call the time of those events a dark age. Indeed, we are too
indulgent to our own proficiency. The Abbe John Ball understood the
rights of man as well as the Abbe Gregoire. That reverend patriarch of
sedition, and prototype of our modern preachers, was of opinion, with
the National Assembly, that all the evils which have fallen upon men had
been caused by an ignorance of their "having been born and continued
equal as to their rig