Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 04.djvu/25

 speak encouragement and well-speed-ye. Nay finally 'twelve Members of the Legislative go daily,' not to encourage only, but to bear a hand, and delve: it was decreed with acclamation. Arms shall either be provided; or else the ingenuity of man crack itself, and become fatuity. Lean Beaumarchais, thinking to serve the Fatherland, and do a stroke of trade in the old way, has commissioned sixty-thousand stand of good arms out of Holland: would to Heaven, for Fatherland's sake and his, they were come! Meanwhile railings are torn up; hammered into pikes; chains themselves shall be welded together into pikes. The very coffins of the dead are raised; for melting into balls. All Church-bells must down into the furnace to make cannon; all Church-plate into the mint to make money. Also, behold the fair swan-bevies of Citoyennes that have alighted in Churches, and sit there with swan-neck,—sewing tents and regimentals! Nor are Patriotic Gifts wanting, from those that have aught left; nor stingily given: the fair Villaumes, mother and daughter, Milliners in the Rue St.-Martin, give a 'silver thimble, and a coin of fifteen sous (sevenpence halfpenny),' with other similar effects; and offer, at least the mother does, to mount guard. Men who have not even a thimble, give a thimbleful,—were it but of invention. One Citoyen has wrought out the scheme of a wooden cannon; which France shall exclusively profit by, in the first instance. It is to be made of staves, by the coopers;—of almost boundless calibre, but uncertain as to strength! Thus they: hammering, scheming, stitching, founding, with all their heart and with all their soul. Two bells only are to remain in each Parish,—for tocsin and other purposes.

But mark also, precisely while the Prussian batteries were playing their briskest at Longwi in the Northeast, and our dastardly Lavergne saw nothing for it but surrender,—southwestward, in remote, patriarchal La Vendée, that sour ferment about Nonjuring Priests, after long working, is ripe, and explodes: at the wrong moment for us! And so we have 'eight-thousand Peasants at Châtillon-sur-Sèvre' who will not