The things we do!

He has no
fear of the law, because he abolishes it. The action begun carries
him further than he intended to go. Peril and resistance exasperate
his anger. He catches the fever from contact with those who are
fevered, and follows robbers who have become his comrades.[1] Add
to this the clamors, the drunkenness, the spectacle of destruction,
the nervous tremor of the body strained beyond its powers of
endurance, and we can comprehend how, from the peasant, the laborer,
and the bourgeois, pacified and tamed by an old civilization, we see
all of a sudden spring forth the barbarian. Or still worse, the
primitive animal, the grinning, sanguinary, wanton baboon, who
giggles while he slays, and gambols over the ruin he has
accomplished. Such is the actual government to which France is
given up, and after eighteen months' experience, the best qualified,
most judicious and profoundest observer of the Revolution will find
nothing to compare it to but the invasion of the Roman Empire in the
fourth century.


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