You have saved France, you will regenerate humanity.

The whole world looks on you in admiration; finish your glorious work--forward, always forward." Superior good sense and rooted convictions could alone stand firm against this flood of seductions and solicitations; but vacillating and ordinary men are carried away by it.

In the harmony of applause which rises, they do not hear the crash of the ruins they produce.

In any case, they stop their ears, and shun the cries of the oppressed; they refuse to admit that their work could possibly bring about evil results; they accept the sophisms and untruths which justify it; they allow the assassinated to be calumniated in order to excuse the assassins; they listen to Merlin de Douay, who, after three or four jacqueries, when pillaging, arson, and murder are going on in all the provinces, has just declared in the name of the Committee on Feudalism[2134] that "a law must be presented to the people, the justice of which may enforce silence on the feudatory egoists who, for the past six months, so indecently protest against plunder; the wisdom of which may restore to a sense of duty the peasant who has been led astray for a moment by his resentment of a long oppression." And when Raynal, the surviving patriarch of the philosophic party, one day, for a wonder, takes the plain truth with him into their tribune, they resent his straightforwardness as an outrage, and excuse it solely on the ground of his imbecility.

An omnipotent legislator cannot depreciate himself; like a king he is condemned to self-admiration in his public capacity.