r what
conditions, with what compliances and with what complicity, with what
deference to clamorous opinion, with what docility in the presence of
rioters, with what submission to the orders of the mob, with what a
deluge of sentimental phrases and commonplace abstractions. Sent to
Paris as deputies, through the choice or toleration of the clubs, they
bear along with them their politics and their rhetoric. The result is
an assemblage of narrow, perverted, hasty, inflated and feeble minds; at
each daily session, twenty word-mills turn to no purpose, the greatest
of public powers at once becoming a manufactory of nonsense, a school of
extravagancies, and a theatre for declamation.

II.--Degree and quality of their intelligence and Culture.

Is it possible that serious men could have listened to such weird
nonsense until the bitter end?

"I am a tiller of the soil,"[2210] says one deputy, "I now dare speak
of the antique nobility of my plow. A yoke of oxen once constituted
the pure, incorruptible legal worthies before whom my good ancestors
executed their contracts, the authenticity of which, far better recorded
on the soil than on flimsy parchment, is protected from any species of
revolution whatever."

Is it conceivable that the reporter of a law, that is about to exile or
imprison forty thousand priests, should employ in an argument such silly
bombast as the following?[2211]

"I have seen in the rural districts the hymeneal torch diffusing only
pale and somber rays, or, transformed into the flambeaux of furies,
the hideous skeleton of superstition seated even on the nuptial couch,
placed between nature and the wedded, and arresting, etc.... Oh Rome,
art thou satisfied? Art thou then like Saturn, to whom fresh holocausts
were daily imperative?... Depart, ye creators of discord! The soil of
liberty is weary of bearing you. Would ye breathe the atmosphere of the
Aventine mount? The national ship is already prepared for you. I hear on
the shore the impatient cries of the crew; I see the breezes of liberty
swelling its sails. Like Telemachus, ye will go forth on the waters to
seek your father; but never will you have to dread the Sicilian rocks,
nor the seductions of a Eucharis."

Courtesies of pedants, rhetorical personifications, and the invective of
maniacs is the prevailing tone. The same defect characterizes the best
speeches, namely, an overexcited brain, a passion for high-sounding
terms, the constant use