* The club, founded in 1789, was called "Jacobin," because they met in the hall of the Dominicans, who had been called Jacobins from the street St. Jacques in which they were first established, anno 1219.
** It was probably this letter that Gouverneur Morris alludes to in his "Diary," when, writing of a Fourth of July dinner given by Mr. Short (U. S. Chargé d'Affaires), he mentions the presence of Paine, "inflated to the eyes and big with a letter of Revolutions."
*** In this spirit was written Part I. of "The Rights of Man" whose translation by M. Lanthenas, with new preface, appeared in May. Sieyès agreed that "hereditaryship" was theoretically wrong, "but," he said, "refer to the histories of all elective monarchies and principalities: is there one in which the elective mode is not worse than the hereditary succession?" For notes on this incident see Professor F. A. Aulard's important work, "Les Orateurs de l'Assemblee Constituante," p. 411. Also Henri Martin's "Histoire de France," i., p. 193.
"I am not the personal enemy of Kings. Quite the contrary. No man wishes more heartily than myself to see them all in the happy and honorable state of private individuals; but I am the avowed, open, and intrepid enemy of what is called monarchy; and I am such by principles which nothing can either alter or corrupt--by my attachment to humanity; by the anxiety which I feel within myself for the dignity and honor of the human race; by the disgust which I experience when I observe men directed by children and governed by brutes; by the horror which all the evils that monarchy has spread over the earth excite within my breast; and by those sentiments which make me shudder at the calamities, the exactions, the wars, and the massacres with which monarchy has crushed mankind: in short, it is against all the hell of monarchy that I have declared war."
In reply Sieyès used the terms "monarchy" and "republic" in unusual senses. He defines "republic" as a government in which the executive power is lodged in more than one person, "monarchy" as one where it is entrusted to one only. He asserted that while he was in this sense a monarchist Paine was a "polycrat." In a republic all action must finally lodge in an executive council deciding by majority, and nominated by the people or the National Assembly. Sieyès did not, however, care to enter the lists. "My letter does not announce that I have leisure to enter into a controversy with republican _polycrats_."