me of the city of Paris, "chief sentinel of the
nation," they assume to govern France: Danton betakes himself to the
National Assembly and declares that the citizens of Paris are the
natural representatives of the eighty-three departments, and summons it,
on their injunction, to cancel an act it has passed.[3165]--The entire
Jacobin conception is therein expressed: Danton, with his keen insight,
took it all in and proclaimed it in appropriate terms; to apply it at
the present time on a grand scale,[3166] he has merely to pass from the
small theatre to the large one, from the Cordeliers club to the Commune,
to the Ministry, and the Committee of Public Safety, and, in all these
theatres, he plays the same part with the same end in view and the same
results. A despotism formed by conquest and maintained by terror,
the despotism of the Jacobin Parisian rabble, is the end to which he
directly marches. He employs no other means and, adapting the means
to the end and the end to the means, manages the important days
and instigates the decisive measures of the Revolution: the 10th
of August,[3167] the 2nd of September, the 31st of May, the 2nd of
June;[3168] the decree providing for an army of paid sans-culottes "to
keep down aristocrats with their pikes;" the decree in each commune
where grain is dear, taxing the rich to put bread within reach of the
poor;[3169] the decree giving laborers forty sous for attending the
meetings of the Section Assemblies;[3170] the institution of the
revolutionary Tribunal;[3171] the proposal to erect the Committee of
Public Safety into a provisional government; the proclamation of Terror;
the concentration of Jacobin zeal on useful works; the employment of the
eight thousand delegates of the primary assemblies, who had been
sent home as recruiting agents for the universal armament;[3172]
the inflammatory expressions of young men on the frontier; the wise
resolutions for limiting the levy en masse to men between eighteen and
twenty-five, which put an end to the scandalous songs and dances by the
populace in the very hall of the Convention.[3173]

In order to set the machine up, he cleared the ground, fused the metal,
hammered out the principal pieces, filed off the blisters, designed the
action, adjusted the minor wheels, set it agoing and indicated what it
had to do, and, at the same time, he forged the armor which guarded
it against strangers and outside violence. The machine being his, why,
aft