Carried into power by brutal force, it must perish if it does not maintain itself, and this can be done only through terror .-- Let us pause and consider this unusual situation.

Installed in the Hotel-de-ville by a nightly surprise attack, about one hundred strangers, delegated by a party which thinks or asserts itself to be the peoples' delegates, have overthrown one of the two great powers of the State, mangled and enslaved the other, and now rule in a capital of 700,000 souls, by the grace of eight or ten thousand fanatics and cut-throats.

Never did a radical change promote men from so low a point and raise so high! The basest of newspaper scribblers, penny-a-liners out of the gutters, bar-room oracles, unfrocked monks and priests, the refuse of the literary guild, of the bar, and of the clergy, carpenters, turners, grocers, locksmiths, shoemakers, common laborers, many with no profession at all, strolling politicians and [3122]public brawlers, who, like the sellers of counterfeit wares, have speculated for the past three years on popular credulity.

There were among them a number of men in bad repute, of doubtful honesty or of proven dishonesty, who, in their youth led shiftless lives.

They are still besmirched with old slime, they were put outside the pale of useful labor by their vices, driven out of inferior stations even into prohibited occupations, bruised by the perilous leap, with consciences distorted like the muscles of a tight-rope dancer.