tumultuously carries out its violent action, each individual the
most brutal, the most irrational, and most corrupt, descends lower
than himself, even to the darkness, the madness, and the savagery of
the dregs of society. In fact, a man who in the interchange of
blows, would resist the excitement of murder, and not use his
strength like a savage, must be familiar with arms. He must be
accustomed to danger, be cool-blooded, alive to the sentiment of
honor, and above all, sensitive to that stern military code which,
to the imagination of the soldier, ever holds out to him the
provost's gibbet to which he is sure to rise, should he strike one
blow too many. Should all these restraints, inward as well as
outward, be wanting, the man plunges into insurrection. He is a
novice in the acts of violence, which he carries out. He has no
fear of the law, because he abolishes it. The action begun carries
him further than he intended to go. Peril and resistance exasperate
his anger. He catches the fever from contact with those who are
fevered, and follows robbers who have become his comrades.[1] Add
to this the clamors, the drunkenness, the spectacle of destruction,
the nervous tremor of the body strained beyond its powers of
endurance, and we can comprehend how, from the peasant, the laborer,
and the bourgeois, pacified and tamed by an old civilization, we see
all of a sudden spring forth the barbarian. Or still worse, the
primitive animal, the grinning, sanguinary, wanton baboon, who
giggles while he slays, and gambols over the ruin he has
accomplished. Such is the actual government to which France is
given up, and after eighteen months' experience, the best qualified,
most judicious and profoundest observer of the Revolution will find
nothing to compare it to but the invasion of the Roman Empire in the
fourth century.[2] "The Huns, the Heruli, the Vandals, and the Goths
will come neither from the north nor from the Black Sea; they are in