they need to examine the interests and
attitude of the different classes. They need not too seriously weigh
their own means. All they have to do is to give the signal in order to
have the "people" fall upon the "oppressors" with all its inexhaustible
resources. If, thereupon, in the execution, their interests turn out to
be uninteresting, and their power to be impotence, it is ascribed either
to depraved sophists, who split up the "undivisible people" into several
hostile camps; or to the army being too far brutalized and blinded to
appreciate the pure aims of the democracy as its own best; or to some
detail in the execution that wrecks the whole plan; or, finally, to an
unforeseen accident that spoiled the game this time. At all events, the
democrat comes out of the disgraceful defeat as immaculate as he went
innocently into it, and with the refreshed conviction that he must win;
not that he himself and his party must give up their old standpoint, but
that, on the contrary, conditions must come to his aid.

For all this, one must not picture to himself the decimated, broken,
and, by the new parliamentary regulation, humbled Mountain altogether
too unhappy. If June 13 removed its leaders, it, on the other hand, made
room for new ones of inferior capacity, who are flattered by their new
position. If their impotence in parliament could no longer be doubted,
they were now justified to limit their activity to outbursts of moral
indignation. If the party of Order pretended to see in them, as the last
official representatives of the revolution, all the horrors of anarchy
incarnated, they were free to appear all the more flat and modest
in reality. Over June 13 they consoled themselves with the profound
expression: "If they but dare to assail universal suffrage . . . then
. . . then we will show who we are!" Nous verrons. [#5 We shall see.]

As to the "Mountaineers," who had fled abroad, it suffices here to
say that Ledru-Rollin--he having accomplished the feat of hopelessly
ruining, in barely a fortnight, the powerful party at whose head he
stood--, found himself called upon to build up a French government "in
partibus;" that his figure, at a distance, removed from the field of
action, seemed to gain in size in the measure that the level of the
revolution sank and the official prominences of official France became
more and more dwarfish; that he could figure as republican Pretender
for 1852, and periodically issued to the Wa