A rude and grim presumption renders the fool and the ignoramus unconscious of their insignificance.

They have deemed themselves capable of anything, because the law granted public functions merely to capacity.

There has appeared in front of one and all an ambitious perspective; the soldier thinks only of displacing his captain, the captain of becoming general, the clerk of supplanting the chief of his department, the new-fledged attorney of being admitted to the high court, the cure of being ordained a bishop, the shallow scribbler of seating himself on the legislative bench.

Offices and professions vacated by the appointment of so many upstarts afford in their turn a vast field for the ambition of the lower classes."-- Thus, step by step, owing to the reversal of social positions, is brought about a general intellectual fever.
"France is transformed into a gaming-table, where, alongside of the discontented citizen offering his stakes, sits, bold, blustering, and with fermenting brain, the pretentious subaltern rattling his dice-box...

At the sight of a public official rising from nowhere, even the soul of a bootblack will bound with emulation."-- He has merely to push himself ahead and elbow his way to secure a ticket "in this immense lottery of popular luck, of preferment without merit, of success without talent, of apotheoses without virtues, of an infinity of places distributed by the people wholesale, and enjoyed by the people in detail."-- Political charlatans flock thither from every quarters, those taking the lead who, being most in earnest, believe in the virtue of their nostrum, and need power to impose its recipe on the community; all being saviors, all places belong to them, and especially the highest.
They lay siege to these conscientiously and philanthropically; if necessary, they will take them by assault, hold them through force, and, forcibly or otherwise, administer their cure-all to the human species.
III .-- Psychology of the Jacobin.
His intellectual method .-- Tyranny of formulae and suppression of facts .-- Mental balance disturbed .-- Signs of this in the revolutionary language .-- Scope and expression of the Jacobin intellect .-- In what respect his method is mischievous .-- How it is successful .-- Illusions produced by it.
Such are our Jacobins, born out of social decomposition like mushrooms out of compost.