onsistent with the democratic
principle to introduce election into the Church. It involved a breach
with Rome; but so, indeed, did the laws of Joseph II., Charles III., and
Leopold. The Pope was not likely to cast away the friendship of France,
if he could help it; and the French clergy were not likely to give
trouble by their attachment to Rome. Therefore, amid the indifference of
many, and against the urgent, and probably sincere, remonstrances of
Robespierre and Marat, the Jansenists, who had a century of persecution
to avenge, carried the Civil Constitution. The coercive measures which
enforced it led to the breach with the King, and the fall of the
monarchy; to the revolt of the provinces, and the fall of liberty. The
Jacobins determined that public opinion should not reign, that the State
should not remain at the mercy of powerful combinations. They held the
representatives of the people under control, by the people itself. They
attributed higher authority to the direct than to the indirect voice of
the democratic oracle. They armed themselves with power to crush every
adverse, every independent force, and especially to put down the
Church, in whose cause the provinces had risen against the capital. They
met the centrifugal federalism of the friends of the Gironde by the most
resolute centralisation. France was governed by Paris; and Paris by its
municipality and its mob. Obeying Rousseau's maxim, that the people
cannot delegate its power, they raised the elementary constituency above
its representatives. As the greatest constituent body, the most numerous
accumulation of primary electors, the largest portion of sovereignty,
was in the people of Paris, they designed that the people of Paris
should rule over France, as the people of Rome, the mob as well as the
senate, had ruled, not ingloriously, over Italy, and over half the
nations that surround the Mediterranean. Although the Jacobins were
scarcely more irreligious than the Abbe Sieyes or Madame Roland,
although Robespierre wanted to force men to believe in God, although
Danton went to confession and Barere was a professing Christian, they
imparted to modern democracy that implacable hatred of religion which
contrasts so strangely with the example of its Puritan prototype.

The deepest cause which made the French Revolution so disastrous to
liberty was its theory of equality. Liberty was the watchword of the
middle class, equality of the lower. It was the lower