foe
with drawn weapon, one right stroke is final; for, physically speaking,
when the brains are out the man does honestly die, and trouble you no
more. But how different when it is with arguments you fight! Here no
victory yet definable can be considered as final. Beat him down, with
Parliamentary invective, till sense be fled; cut him in two, hanging
one half in this dilemma-horn, the other on that; blow the brains
or thinking-faculty quite out of him for the time: it skills not; he
rallies and revives on the morrow; to-morrow he repairs his golden
fires! The think that will logically extinguish him is perhaps still a
desideratum in Constitutional civilisation. For how, till a man know,
in some measure, at what point he becomes logically defunct, can
Parliamentary Business be carried on, and Talk cease or slake?

Doubtless it was some feeling of this difficulty; and the clear insight
how little such knowledge yet existed in the French Nation, new in the
Constitutional career, and how defunct Aristocrats would continue to
walk for unlimited periods, as Partridge the Alamanack-maker did,--that
had sunk into the deep mind of People's-friend Marat, an eminently
practical mind; and had grown there, in that richest putrescent soil,
into the most original plan of action ever submitted to a People. Not
yet has it grown; but it has germinated, it is growing; rooting itself
into Tartarus, branching towards Heaven: the second season hence, we
shall see it risen out of the bottomless Darkness, full-grown, into
disastrous Twilight,--a Hemlock-tree, great as the world; on or under
whose boughs all the People's-friends of the world may lodge. 'Two
hundred and sixty thousand Aristocrat heads:' that is the precisest
calculation, though one would not stand on a few hundreds; yet we never
rise as high as the round three hundred thousand. Shudder at it,
O People; but it is as true as that ye yourselves, and your
People's-friend, are alive. These prating Senators of yours hover
ineffectual on the barren letter, and will never save the Revolution. A
Cassandra-Marat cannot do it, with his single shrunk arm; but with a few
determined men it were possible. "Give me," said the People's-friend, in
his cold way, when young Barbaroux, once his pupil in a course of what
was called Optics, went to see him, "Give me two hundred Naples Bravoes,
armed each with a good dirk, and a muff on his left arm by way
of shield: with them I will traverse France,