revented by a _veto_.

"For a long while we have been in possession of the civism of our
Directory, when we saw it in an incendiary proclamation, not only again
open the evangelical pulpits to the priests, but the seditious tribunes
to conspirators in surplices! Their address is a manifesto tending to
degrade the constitutional powers: it is a collective petition--it is an
incentive to civil war, and the overthrow of the constitution. Assuredly
we are no admirers of the representative government, of which we think
with J. J. Rousseau; and if we like certain articles but little, still
less do we like civil war. So many grounds of accusation! The crime of
these men is settled. Strike, then! If the head sleeps, shall the arm
act? Raise not that arm again; do not rouse the national club only to
crush insects. A Varnier or De Latre! Did Cato and Cicero accuse
Cethegus or Catiline? It is the leaders we should assail. Strike at the
head."

This strain of irony and boldness, less applauded by the clapping of
hands than by shouts of laughter, delighted the tribunes. They voted the
sending of the _proces verbal_ of the meeting into every department. It
was legislatively elevating a pamphlet to the dignity of a public act,
and to distribute ready-made insult to the citizens, that they might
have a supply to vent against public authority. The king trembled before
the pamphleteer; he felt from this first treatment of his baffled
prerogative that the constitution would crumble in his hands each time
that he dared to make use of it.

The next day the constitutional party in greater force at the meeting
recalled the sending of this pamphlet to the departments. Brissot was
angry in his journal, the _Patriote Francais_. It was there and at the
Jacobins more than in the tribune, that he gave instructions to his
party, and allowed the idea of a republic to escape him. Brissot had not
the properties of an orator: his dogged spirit, sectarian and arbitrary,
was fitter for conspiracy than action: the ardour of his mind was
excessive, but concentrated. He shed neither those lights nor those
flames which kindle enthusiasm--that explosion of ideas. It was the lamp
of the Gironde party; it was neither its beacon nor its torch.

XX.

The Jacobins, weakened for a time by the great number of their members
elected to the Legislative Assembly, remained for a brief space without
a fixed course to pursue, like an army disbanded after victory. The