Demand that the nation's poor have a future secured to them out of the
national contribution. If you are refused join the army, take the
land, as well as gold which the rascals who want to force you to come
to terms by hunger have buried and share it amongst you. Off with the
heads of the ministers and their underlings, for now is the time; that
of Lafayette and of every rascal on his staff, and of every
unpatriotic battalion officer, including Bailly and those municipal
reactionaries - all the traitors in the National Assembly!"

Marat, indeed, still passes for a furious ranter among people of some
intelligence. But for all that, this is the sum and substance of his
theory: It installs in the political establishment, over the heads of
delegated, regular, and legal powers an anonymous, imbecile, and
terrific power whose decisions are absolute, whose projects are
constantly adopted, and whose intervention is sanguinary. This power
is that of the crowd, of a ferocious, suspicious sultan, who,
appointing his viziers, keeps his hands free to direct them and his
scimitar ready sharpened to cut of their heads.

II. The Jacobins. -

Formation of the Jacobins. - The common human elements of his
character. - Conceit and dogmatism are sensitive and rebellious in
every community. - How kept down in all well-founded societies. -
Their development in the new order of things. -Effect of milieu on
imagination and ambitions. - The stimulants of Utopianism, abuses of
speech, and derangement of ideas. - Changes in office; interests
playing upon and perverted feeling.

That a speculator in his closet should have concocted such a theory is