Nearly all the
revolutionaries count on escaping the constraints they impose, and who
only like the strait jacket when it is on another's back. - The
influence of resistant wills at this moment becomes incalculable: it
would be easier to raise a mountain, and, just at this moment, the
Jacobins have deprived themselves of every moral force through which a
political engineer acts on human wills.
Unlike Philip II. and Louis XIV. they are not supported by the
intolerance of a vast majority, for, instead of fifteen or twenty
orthodox against one heretic, they count in their church scarcely more
than one orthodox against fifteen or twenty heretics.[21] - They are
not, like legitimate sovereigns, supported by the stubborn loyalty of
an entire population, following in the steps of its chieftain out of
the prestige of hereditary right and through habits of ancient fealty.
On the contrary, their reign is only a day old and they themselves are
interlopers. At first installed by a coup d'?tat and afterwards by
the semblance of an election, they have extorted or obtained by trick
the suffrages through which they act. They are so familiar with fraud
and violence that, in their own Assembly, the ruling minority has
seized and held on to power by violence and fraud, putting down the
majority by riots, and the departments by force of arms.
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