He employs no other means and, adapting the means to the end and the end to the means, manages the important days and instigates the decisive measures of the Revolution: the 10th of August,[3167] the 2nd of September, the 31st of May, the 2nd of June;[3168] the decree providing for an army of paid sans-culottes "to keep down aristocrats with their pikes;" the decree in each commune where grain is dear, taxing the rich to put bread within reach of the poor;[3169] the decree giving laborers forty sous for attending the meetings of the Section Assemblies;[3170] the institution of the revolutionary Tribunal;[3171] the proposal to erect the Committee of Public Safety into a provisional government; the proclamation of Terror; the concentration of Jacobin zeal on useful works; the employment of the eight thousand delegates of the primary assemblies, who had been sent home as recruiting agents for the universal armament;[3172] the inflammatory expressions of young men on the frontier; the wise resolutions for limiting the levy en masse to men between eighteen and twenty-five, which put an end to the scandalous songs and dances by the populace in the very hall of the Convention.[3173] In order to set the machine up, he cleared the ground, fused the metal, hammered out the principal pieces, filed off the blisters, designed the action, adjusted the minor wheels, set it agoing and indicated what it had to do, and, at the same time, he forged the armor which guarded it against strangers and outside violence.

The machine being his, why, after constructing it, did he not serve as its engineer?
Because, if competent to construct it, he was not qualified to manage it.

In a crisis, he may give a helping hand, win the support of an assembly or a mob, direct, high-handedly and for a few weeks, an executive committee.

But regular, persistent labor is repugnant to him; he is not made for bookkeeping,[3174] for paper and administrative work.
Never, like Robespierre and Billaud can he attend to both official and police duties at the same time, carefully reading minute daily reports, annotating mortuary lists, extemporizing ornate abstractions, coolly enunciating falsehoods and acting out the patient, satisfied inquisitor; and especially, he can never become the systematic executioner .-- On the one hand, his eyes are not obscured by the gray veil of theory: he does not regard men through the "Contrat-Social" as a sum of arithmetical units,[3175] but as they really are, living, suffering, shedding their blood, especially those he knows, each with his peculiar physiognomy and demeanor.

Compassion is excited by all this when one has any feeling, and he had.