ns the policy failed, and the Jacobins governed
on the principle that power, coming from the people, ought to be
concentrated in the fewest possible hands and made absolutely
irresistible. Equality became the substitute of liberty, and the
danger arose that the most welcome form of equality would be the equal
distribution of property. The Jacobin statesmen, the thinkers of the
party, undertook to abolish poverty without falling into Socialism.
They had the Church property, which served as the basis of the public
credit. They had the royal domain, the confiscated estates of
emigrants and malignants, the common lands, the forest lands. And in
time of war there was the pillage of opulent neighbours. By these
operations the income of the peasantry was doubled, and it was deemed
possible to relieve the masses from taxation, until, by the immense
transfer of property, there should be no poor in the Republic. These
schemes were at an end, and the Constitution of the year III. closes
the revolutionary period.

The royalists and conservatives of the capital would have acquiesced
in the defeat of their hopes but for the additional article which
threatened to perpetuate power in the hands of existing deputies,
which had been carried by a far smaller vote than that which was given
in favour of the organic law itself. The alarm and the indignation
were extreme, and the royalists, on counting their forces, saw that
they had a good chance against the declining assembly. Nearly thirty
thousand men were collected, and the command was given to an
experienced officer. It had been proposed by some to confer it on the
Count Colbert de Maulevrier, the former employer of Stofflet. This was
refused on the ground that they were not absolutists or _emigres_, but
Liberals, and partisans of constitutional monarchy, and of no other.

The army of the Convention was scarcely six thousand, and a large body
of Jacobin roughs were among them. The command was bestowed on Menou,
a member of the minority of nobles of 1789. But Menou was disgusted
with his materials, and felt more sympathy with the enemy. He
endeavoured to negotiate, and was deposed, and succeeded by Barras,
the victor in the bloodless battle of Thermidor.

Bonaparte, out of employment, was lounging in Paris, and as he came
out of the theatre he found himself among the men who were holding the
parley. He hurried to headquarters, where the effect of his defining
words upon the scared auth