Consider further that each of the Forty-eight Districts has its own Committee; speaking and motioning continually; aiding in the search for grain, in the search for a Constitution; checking and spurring the poor Three Hundred of the Townhall.  That Danton, with a ’voice reverberating from the domes,’ is President of the Cordeliers District; which has already become a Goshen of Patriotism.  That apart from the ’seventeen thousand utterly necessitous, digging on Montmartre,’ most of whom, indeed, have got passes, and been dismissed into Space ’with four shillings,’—­there is a strike, or union, of Domestics out of place; who assemble for public speaking:  next, a strike of Tailors, for even they will strike and speak; further, a strike of Journeymen Cordwainers; a strike of Apothecaries:  so dear is bread. (Histoire Parlementaire, ii. 359, 417, 423.) All these, having struck, must speak; generally under the open canopy; and pass resolutions;—­Lafayette and his Patrols watching them suspiciously from the distance.

Unhappy mortals:  such tugging and lugging, and throttling of one another, to divide, in some not intolerable way, the joint Felicity of man in this Earth; when the whole lot to be divided is such a ’feast of shells!’—­Diligent are the Three Hundred; none equals Scipio Americanus in dealing with mobs.  But surely all these things bode ill for the consolidating of a Revolution.

BOOK VII.

THE INSURRECTION OF WOMEN

Chapter 1.7.I.

Patrollotism.

No, Friends, this Revolution is not of the consolidating kind.  Do not fires, fevers, sown seeds, chemical mixtures, men, events; all embodiments of Force that work in this miraculous Complex of Forces, named Universe,—­go on growing, through their natural phases and developments, each according to its kind; reach their height, reach their visible decline; finally sink under, vanishing, and what we call die?  They all grow; there is nothing but what grows, and shoots forth into its special expansion,—­once give it leave to spring.  Observe too that each grows with a rapidity proportioned, in general, to the madness and unhealthiness there is in it:  slow regular growth, though this also ends in death, is what we name health and sanity.

A Sansculottism, which has prostrated Bastilles, which has got pike and musket, and now goes burning Chateaus, passing resolutions and haranguing under roof and sky, may be said to have sprung; and, by law of Nature, must grow.  To judge by the madness and diseasedness both of itself, and of the soil and element it is in, one might expect the rapidity and monstrosity would be extreme.