no credit or influence; they are supported only by those whom they
really represent, that is to say, those who elected them, a tenth of
the population, and forming a sectarian minority. Again, in this
minority there are a good many who are lukewarm; with most men the
distance is great between conviction and action; the interval is
filled up with acquired habits, indolence, fear and egoism. One's
belief in the abstractions of the "Contrat-social" is of little
account; no one readily bestirs oneself for an abstract end.
Uncertainties beset one at the outset; the road one has to follow is
found to be perilous and obscure, and one hesitates and postpones; one
feels himself a home-body and is afraid of engaging too deeply and of
going too far. Having expended one's breath in words one is less
willing to give one's money; another may open his purse but he may not
be disposed to give himself, which is as true of the Girondins as it
is of the Feuillants.

"At Marseilles,[59] at Bordeaux," says a deputy, "in nearly all the
principal towns, the proprietor, slow, indifferent and timid, could
not make up his mind to leave home for a moment; it was to mercenaries
that he entrusted his cause his arms."

Only the federates of Mayenne, Ile-et-Vilaine, and especially of
Finisterre, were "young men well brought up and well informed about
the cause they were going to support." In Normandy, the Central
Committee, unable to do better, has to recruit its soldiers, and
especially gunners, from the band of Carabots, former Jacobins, a lot
of ruffians ready for anything, pillagers and runaways at the first
canon-shot. At Caen, Wimpffen, having ordered the eight battalions of
the National Guard to assemble in the court, demands volunteers and
finds that only seventeen step forth; on the following day a formal