sole resource was to depend on themselves to the last. -- Thus,
through its unreasonableness, the "Mountain" condemns itself to a
number of sieges or blockades which lasted several months,[77] to
leaving Var and Savoy unprotected, to exhausting the arsenals, to
employing against Frenchmen[78] troops and munitions needed against
foreigners, and all this at the moment the foreigner was taking
Valenciennes[79] and Mayence, when thirty thousand royalist were
organizing in Lozére, when the great Vendean army was laying siege to
Nantes, when each new outbreak of fighting was threatening to connect
the flaming frontier with the conflagration in the Catholic
countries.[80] -- With a jet of cold water aptly directed, the
"Mountain" could extinguish the fires it had kindled in the great
republican towns; otherwise, nothing remained but to let them increase
at the risk of consuming the whole country, with no other hope than
that they might at last die out under a mass of ruins, and with no
other object but to rule over captives and the dead.

But this is precisely the Jacobin aim; for, he is not satisfied with
less than absolute submission ; he must rule at any cost, just as he
pleases, by fair means or foul, no matter over what ruins. A despot
by instinct and installation, his dogma has consecrated him King ; he
is King by natural and divine right, in the name of eternal verity,
the same as Philip II., enthroned by his religious system and blessed
by his Holy Office. Hence he can abandon no jot or title of his
authority without a sacrifice of principle, nor treat with rebels,
unless they surrender at discretion; simply for having risen against
legitimate authority, they are traitors and villains. And who are
greater rascals the renegades who, after three years of patient
effort, just as the sect finally reaches its goal, oppose its
accession to power![81] At Nîmes, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Toulon, and