It was a cardinal principle of the Mountaineers (and of the Girondists, too, who in their time had been Jacobins and were still Rousseauists) that the people, the real people, could not be divided in its will. The struggle, in their eyes, was between patriots and enemies of the public weal; between the people and various weak individuals, private interests and purveyors of false doctrine. But where Mountaineers saw the people, Girondists saw merely a faction; and the people whose goodness was touted by the Gironde seemed to the Mountain only a vast network of private schemers.
