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accomplices, we will declare the military chiefs traitors, we will outlaw
in a body all the crime and all the criminals, we will summon the
citizens to arms, we will recall the army to duty, we will rise up before
Louis Bonaparte, terrible as the living Republic, we will fight on the
one hand with the power of the Law, and on the other with the power of
the People, we will overwhelm this miserable rebel, and will rise up
above his head both as a great Lawful Power and a great Revolutionary
Power!"
While speaking I became intoxicated with my own ideas. My enthusiasm
communicated itself to the meeting. They cheered me. I saw that I was
becoming somewhat too hopeful, that I allowed myself to be carried away,
and that I carried them away, that I presented to them success as
possible, as even easy, at a moment when it was important that no one
should entertain an illusion. The truth was gloomy, and it was my duty
to tell it. I let silence be re-established, and I signed with my hand
that I had a last word to say. I then resumed, lowering my voice,--
"
Listen, calculate carefully what you are doing. On one side a hundred
thousand men, seventeen harnessed batteries, six thousand cannon-mouths
in the forts, magazines, arsenals, ammunition sufficient to carry out a
Russian campaign; on the other a hundred and twenty Representatives, a
thousand or twelve hundred patriots, six hundred muskets, two cartridges
per man, not a drum to beat to arms, not a bell to sound the tocsin, not
a printing office to print a Proclamation; barely here and there a
lithographic press, and a cellar where a hand-bill can be hurriedly and
furtively printed with the brush; the penalty of death against any one
who unearths a paving stone, penalty of death against any one who would
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