The true character of the Jacobin policy is becoming every day more apparent.
The social body, like our own, has its periods of adolescence and senility, its maladies and critical periods, while the axiom that nations have the government they deserve is attested by the fact that governments correspond to the national pathology.
The individuals too who dominate in turbulent times are like straws on an impetuous stream. They merely serve to show the direction of the current and its force.
Danton and Robespierre did not make the Revolution. It made them. A popular fallacy exists that the Revolution ended with the fall of Robespierre, or at any rate when Napoleon planted his artillery before the doors of the National Assembly. It is not over yet, and the men in power to-day are but straws on the surface.
The French Revolution was an avatar of the revolution of the sixteenth century, or rather one of the periodical renaissances or revolts of Paganism against Christianity. No doubt many economical causes were at work in 1789 and there was an urgent need for readjustment.
The corvéable, or what we call to-day the taxpayer, then as now, groaned and repined against the excessive burdens laid upon him. Proportion guarded, it is even true to say to-day that all tradesmen, agriculturists, and shopkeepers, all except the vendors of alcohol, are as much crushed by taxes now as the corvéables were in 1789.
The moving spirit, the genius and soul of the Revolution were the Jacobin Clubs. There were organized the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, theo-philanthropy, the worship of the prostitute as Goddess of Reason, the noyades and the fusillades which made France a vast charnel-house.
To-day the Jacobin Clubs have changed their signboards, they are now Lodges of the Grand Orient. But the spirit is unchanged. The ideal is always the same—the destruction of all revealed religion, and with it the noblest fruit of Christianity, Liberty.
The Jacobin mind, served by organs of political administration, is to constitute the Omnipotent and Infallible State, the golden image before which all must bow down and worship and sacrifice—for is not sacrifice the soul of worship? They must sacrifice all preconceived, congenital, and inherited notions of honour, morality, and religion, and acquiesce humbly in those edicted by the Omnipotent Infallible State; for de facto infallibility is always a concomitant of supremacy. A necessary corollary of moral unity, established by an omnipotent State, is an evening up of social and financial conditions. No man may possess more learning, more wealth, or more prestige than his neighbour. Thus after having preluded by the assault on personal liberty, depriving thousands of men and women of the right to live in communities, the Jacobin Omnipotent State is itself to constitute one vast Congregation in which all, nolens volens, must live and practise Poverty by submitting to fiscal confiscations for the laudable purpose of equalizing fortunes, Chastity or unchastity according to new Government formulæ regarding divorce and free love, etc., with a view to procreation under governmental supervision, and above all Obedience perinde ut cadaver—Obedience to the Omnipotent Infallible State, henceforth the only regulator of their own and their children’s morality.
Since twenty-five years every law, every constitutional and electoral manipulation, has been elaborated at the lodges. To-day sixteen Commissions composed of their most trusted members are masticating the execution of the Associations Bill, or rather the wholesale executions of this guillotine sèche which are imminent. No congregation of men engaged in preaching or teaching is to be tolerated, or its members allowed to exercise these functions even individually. The same rule will be applied to the congregations of women. Those engaged in primary schools have nearly all been dispersed by decree, and in violation of the law, as I have shown. The suppression of those who teach the children of the rich is only a question of a short lapse of time.