, and Peter the Great, stood the entire nation, equally violent,
rallied around the sovereign through his consecrated title and
uncontested right, through tradition and custom, through a rigid
sentiment of duty and the vague idea of public security. - Peter the
Great counted among his auxiliaries every eminent and cultivated man
in the country; Cromwell had his disciplined and twenty-times
victorious army; the caliph or sultan brought along with him his
military and privileged population. - Aided by cohorts of this stamp,
it was easy to raise a heavy mass, and even maintain it in a fixed
position. Once the operation was concluded there followed a sort of
equilibrium; the mass, kept in the air by a permanent counterbalance,
only required a little daily effort to prevent it from falling.
It is just the opposite with the Jacobin enterprise. When it is put
into operation, the theory, more exacting, adds an extra weight to the
uplifted mass, and, finally, a burden of almost infinite weight. - At
first, the Jacobin confined his attacks to royalty, to nobility, to
the Church, to parliaments, to privileges, to ecclesiastical and
feudal possessions, in short, to medieval foundations.
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