the majority may sweep them and their work away to-morrow;
an insurrection of the people, whom they have familiarized with
insurrection, may to-morrow sweep them away, their work and their
majority.--They maintain only a disputed, limited and transient
ascendancy over their adherents. They are not military chieftains like
Cromwell and Napoleon, generals of an army obeyed without a murmur, but
common stump-speakers at the mercy of an audience that sits in judgment
on them. There is no discipline in this public; every Jacobin remains
independent by virtue of his principles; if he accepts leaders, it is
with a reservation of their worth to him; selecting them as he pleases,
he is free to change them when he pleases; his trust in them is
intermittent, his loyalty provisional, and, as his adhesion depends on a
mere preference, he always reserves the right to discard the favorite of
to-day as he has discarded the favorite of yesterday. In this audience,
there is no such thing as subordination; the lowest demagogue, any noisy
subaltern, a Hebert or Jacques Roux, aspiring to step out of the ranks,
overbidding the charlatans in office in order to obtain their places.
Even with a complete and lasting ascendancy over an organized band
of docile supporters, the Jacobin leaders would be feeble for lack of
reliable and competent instruments; for they have but very few
partisans other than those of doubtful probity and of notorious
incapacity.--Cromwell had around him, to carry out the puritan program,
the moral elite of the nation, an army of rigorists, with narrow
consciences, but much more strict towards themselves than towards
others, men who never drank and who never swore, who never indulged for
a moment in sensuality or idleness, who forbade themselves every act
of omission or commission about which they held any scruples, the most
honest, the most temperate, the most laborious and the most persevering
of mankind,[2222] the only ones capable of laying the foundations of
that practical morality on which England and the United States still
subsist at the present day.--Around Peter the Great, in carrying out
his European program, stood the intellectual elite of the country, an
imported staff of men of ability associated with natives of moderate
ability, every well-taught resident foreigner and indigenous Russian,
the only ones able to organize schools and public institutions, to set
up a vast central and regular system of administr