[128] At this moment the
five Directors and their minions are completing the mowing down of the
virile, adult strength of the nation,[129] and we have seen through
what motives and for what object. I do not believe that any civilized
nation was ever sacrificed in the same way, for such a purpose and by
such rulers: the crippled remnant of a faction and sect, some
hundreds of preachers no longer believing in their creed, usurpers as
despised as they are detested, second-rate parvenus raised their heads
not through their capacity or merit, but through the blind upheavals
of a revolution, swimming on the surface for lack of weight, and, like
foul scum, borne along to the crest of the wave-such are the wretches
who strangle France under the pretence of setting her free, who bleed
her under the pretence of making her strong, who conquer populations
under the pretence of emancipating them, who despoil people under the
pretence of regenerating them, and who, from Brest to Lucerne, from
Amsterdam to Naples, slay and rob wholesale, systematically, to
strengthen the incoherent dictatorship of their brutality, folly and
corruption.
IX. National Disgust.
National antipathy to the established order of things.
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