“For a long while we have been in possession of the civism of our Directory, when we saw it in an incendiary proclamation, not only again open the evangelical pulpits to the priests, but the seditious tribunes to conspirators in surplices!  Their address is a manifesto tending to degrade the constitutional powers:  it is a collective petition—­it is an incentive to civil war, and the overthrow of the constitution.  Assuredly we are no admirers of the representative government, of which we think with J. J. Rousseau; and if we like certain articles but little, still less do we like civil war.  So many grounds of accusation!  The crime of these men is settled.  Strike, then!  If the head sleeps, shall the arm act?  Raise not that arm again; do not rouse the national club only to crush insects.  A Varnier or De Latre!  Did Cato and Cicero accuse Cethegus or Catiline?  It is the leaders we should assail.  Strike at the head.”

This strain of irony and boldness, less applauded by the clapping of hands than by shouts of laughter, delighted the tribunes.  They voted the sending of the proces verbal of the meeting into every department.  It was legislatively elevating a pamphlet to the dignity of a public act, and to distribute ready-made insult to the citizens, that they might have a supply to vent against public authority.  The king trembled before the pamphleteer; he felt from this first treatment of his baffled prerogative that the constitution would crumble in his hands each time that he dared to make use of it.

The next day the constitutional party in greater force at the meeting recalled the sending of this pamphlet to the departments.  Brissot was angry in his journal, the Patriote Francais.  It was there and at the Jacobins more than in the tribune, that he gave instructions to his party, and allowed the idea of a republic to escape him.  Brissot had not the properties of an orator:  his dogged spirit, sectarian and arbitrary, was fitter for conspiracy than action:  the ardour of his mind was excessive, but concentrated.  He shed neither those lights nor those flames which kindle enthusiasm—­that explosion of ideas.  It was the lamp of the Gironde party; it was neither its beacon nor its torch.

XX.

The Jacobins, weakened for a time by the great number of their members elected to the Legislative Assembly, remained for a brief space without a fixed course to pursue, like an army disbanded after victory.  The club of the Feuillants, composed of the remains of the constitutional party in the Constituted Assembly, strove to resume the ascendency over the mind of the people.  Barnave, Lameth, and Duport were the leaders of this party.  Fearful of the people, and convinced that an Assembly without any thing to counterbalance it would inevitably absorb the poor remnant of the monarchy, this party wished to have two chambers and an equally poised constitution.  Barnave, whose