ation, to assign rank
according to service and merit, in short, to erect on the snow and
mud of a shapeless barbarism a conservatory of civilization which,
transplanted like an exotic tree, grows and gradually becomes
acclimated.--Around Couthon, Saint-Just, Billaud, Collot, and
Robespierre, with the exception of certain men devoted, not to
Utopianism but the country, and who, like Carnot, conform to the system
in order to save France, there are but a few sectarians to carry out
the Jacobin program. These are men so short-sighted as not to clearly
comprehend its fallacies, or sufficiently fanatical to accept its
horrors, a lot of social outcasts and self-constituted statesmen,
infatuated through incommensurate faculties with the parts they
play, unsound in mind and superficially educated, wholly incompetent,
boundless in ambition, their consciences perverted, callous or deadened
by sophistry, hardened through arrogance or killed by crime, by impunity
and by success.

Thus, whilst other despots raise a moderate weight, calling around them
either the majority or the flower of the nation, employing the best
strength of the country and lengthening their lever (of despotism) as
much as possible, the Jacobins attempt to raise an incalculable weight,
repel the majority as well as the flower of the nation, discard the best
strength of the country, and shorten their lever to the utmost. They
hold on only to the shorter end, the rough, clumsy, iron-bound, creaking
and grinding extremity, that is to say, to physical force,--the means
for physical constraint, the heavy hand of the gendarme on the shoulder
of the suspect, the jailer's bolts and keys turned on the prisoner, the
club used by the sans-culottes on the back of the bourgeois to quicken
his pace, and, better still, the Septembriseur's pike thrust into the
aristocrat's belly, and the blade falling on the neck held fast in the
clutches of the guillotine.--Such, henceforth, is the only machinery
they posses for governing the country, for they have deprived themselves
of all other. Their engine has to be exhibited, for it works only on
condition that its bloody image be stamped indelibly on every body's
imagination; if the Negro monarch or the pasha desires to see heads
bowing as he passes along, he must be escorted by executioners. They
must abuse their engine because fear losing its effect through habit,
needs example to keep it alive; the Negro monarch or the pasha who woul