slative body. This led to
various overtures and discussions, which lasted for several weeks. The
Court offered its mediation; but the nobles giving a peremptory refusal
to come to any compromise, at the motion of the Abbe Sieyes, the Third
Estate, after in vain inviting the two others to join them, constituted
themselves into a national assembly.

This was the first act of the Revolution, or the first occasion on which
a part of a given body of individuals took upon them to decide for the
rest, from the urgency and magnitude of the case, without the consent of
their coadjutors, and contrary to established rules. It was a stroke of
state necessity, to be defended not by the forms but by the essence of
justice, and by the great ends of human society. The usurpation of a
discretionary and illegal power was clear, but nothing could be done
without it, everything with it. Yet so strong and natural is the
prejudice against every appearance of what is violent and arbitrary,
that serious attempts were made to reconcile the letter with the spirit
of justice in this instance, and to prove that the Tiers Etat, being the
representatives of the nation, and the nation being everything, the
nobility and clergy were included in it and had nothing to complain of.
It is not worth while to answer this sophistry. The truth is that the
Third Estate erected themselves from parties concerned into framers of
the law and judges of the reason of the case, and must themselves be
judged, not by precedent and tradition, but by posterity, to whom, from
the scale on which they acted, the benefit or the injury of their
departure from common and worn-out forms will reach. Acts that supersede
old established rules and create a new era in human affairs are to be
approved or condemned by what comes after, not by what has gone before,
them.

This first independent and spirited step on the part of the commons
produced a reaction on the part of the Court. They shut up the place of
sitting. The King had been prevailed on to consent to hostile measures
against the popular side during an excursion to Marly with the Queen and
princes of the blood. Bailly, afterward mayor of Paris, had been chosen
president of the new National Assembly, and, arriving with other
members, and finding the doors of the hall shut against them, they
repaired to the _Jeu de Paumes_ ("Tennis-court") at Versailles, followed
by the people and soldiers in crowds, and there, enclosed by bar