famous legislators, vile scoundrels, monsters athirst for
gold and blood, you traffic with the monarch, with our fortunes,
with our rights, with our liberties, with our lives!"--"The second
legislative corps is no less rotten than the first one."--In the
Convention, Roland, "the officious Gilles and the forger Pasquin, is
the infamous head of the monopolizers." "Isnard is a juggler, Buzot a
Tartuffe, Vergniaud a police spy."[3130]--When a madman sees everywhere
around him, on the floor, on the walls, on the ceiling, toads,
scorpions, spiders, swarms of crawling, loathsome vermin, he thinks only
of crushing them, and the disease enters on its last stage: after the
ambitious delirium, the mania for persecution and the settled nightmare,
comes the homicidal mania.

With Marat, this broke out at the very beginning of the Revolution.
The disease was innate; he was inoculated with it beforehand. He had
contracted it in good earnest, on principle; never was there a plainer
case of deliberate insanity.--On the one hand, having derived the rights
of man from physical necessities, he concluded, "that society owes to
those among its members who have no property, and whose labor scarcely
suffices for their support, an assured subsistence, the wherewithal to
feed, lodge and clothe oneself suitably, provision for attendance in
sickness and when old age comes on, and for bringing up children. Those
who wallow in wealth must (then) supply the wants of those who lack
the necessaries of life." Otherwise, "the honest citizen whom society
abandons to poverty and despair, reverts back to the state of nature and
the right of forcibly claiming advantages which were only alienated by
him to procure greater ones. All authority which is opposed to this is
tyrannical, and the judge who condemns a man to death (through it) is
simply a cowardly assassin."[3131]

Thus do the innumerable riots which the dearth excites, find
justification, and, as the dearth is permanent, the daily riot is
legitimate.--On the other hand, having laid down the principle
of popular sovereignty he deduces from this, "the sacred right of
constituents to dismiss their delegates;" to seize them by the throat
if they prevaricate, to keep them in the right path by fear, and wring
their necks should they attempt to vote wrong or govern badly. Now, they
are always subject to this temptation.

"If there is one eternal truth of which it is important to convince man,
it is that