r the
guillotine.--If such is their presumption in military matters, what
must it be in civil affairs! On this side there is no external check,
no Spanish or German army capable of at once taking them in flagrante
delicto, and of profiting by their ambitious incapacity and mischievous
interference. Whatever the social instrumentality may be--judiciary,
administration, credit, commerce, manufactures, agriculture--they can
dislocate and destroy it with impunity.--They never fail to do this,
and, moreover, in their dispatches, they take credit to themselves for
the ruin they cause. That, indeed, is their mission; otherwise, they
would be regarded as bad Jacobins; they would soon become "suspects;"
they rule only on condition of being infatuated and destructive;
the overthrow of common-sense is with them an act of State grace,
a necessity of the office, and, on this common ground of compulsory
unreason, every species of physical delirium may be set established.

With those that we can follow closely, not only is their judgment
perverted, but the entire nervous apparatus is affected; a permanent
over-excitement and a morbid restlessness has begun.--Consider Joseph
Lebon, son of a sergeant-at-arms, subsequently, a teacher with the
Oratoriens of Beaune, next, cure of Neuville-Vitasse, repudiated as
an interloper by the elite of his parishioners, not respected, without
house or furniture, and almost without a flock.[32116] Two years after
this, finding himself sovereign of his province, his head is
spinning. Lesser events would have made it turn; his is only a
twenty-eight-year-old head, not very solid, without any inside
ballast,[32117] already disturbed by vanity, ambition, rancor, and
apostasy, by the sudden and complete volteface which puts him in
conflict with his past educational habits and most cherished affections:
it breaks down under the vastness and novelty of this greatness.--In
the costume of a representative, a Henry IV hat, tri-color plume, waving
scarf, and saber dragging the ground, Lebon orders the bell to be rung
and summons the villagers into the church, where, aloft in the pulpit in
which he had formerly preached in a threadbare cassock, he displays his
metamorphosis.

"Who would believe that I should have returned here with unlimited
powers!"[32118]

And that, before his counterfeit majesty, each person would be humble,
bowed down and silent! To a member of the municipality of Cambray who,
questioned b