seeing to the free circulation of provisions, had, in fact, little to do but to publish manifestoes; for such was the universal jealousy of the concentration of power, that the only bodies that possessed any were those who could lay claim to none.
What kind of Government should France now adopt was the question. Madame Roland would fain have seen a Republic inhabited by citizens such as Plutarch had taught her to love. Rut she forgot the dissimilarity of conditions: that enormous proletariat of France—hungry, violent, ignorant, tumultuous—about to be enfranchised, and to affect directly the future working of political institutions. Her own party, the Girondins, were the only men in the State whose culture would have rendered them fit to realise such a form of Government in its purity; but the foreign invasion, by driving the people into a frenzy of rage and fear, rendered unpopular all measures but those of violence and terror.
Longwy and Verdun had been taken by the Prussians; Paris lay exposed to the enemy; in the very capital a portion of the population secretly rejoiced at these defeats of the French army. A panic of desperation seized the people. They did not tremble for their country alone; they trembled still more for that newly-born liberty, already so dearly purchased. "Vivre libre ou mourir!" became the universal cry. The press of volunteers to the public places to inscribe their names on the altar of the country was so enormous that numbers had to be sent away. It seemed as though soldiers sprang from the ground, as those armed men were fabled to have done from the dragon's teeth of Cadmus. But the fact of so many patriots departing for the frontier seemed to promise Royalists
