orizon, busy only with that which
brings in their daily bread, find abstract doctrines unintelligible;
should the dogmas of the new catechism arrest their attention the same
thing happens as with the old one, they do not understand them; that
mental faculty by which an abstraction is reached is not yet formed in
them. On being taken to a political club they fall asleep; they
open their eyes only when some one announces that tithes and feudal
privileges are to be restored; they can be depended on for nothing more
than a brawl and a jacquerie; later on, when their grain comes to be
taxed or is taken, they prove as unruly under the republic as under the
monarchy.

The believers in this theory come from other quarters, from the two
extremes of the lower stratum of the middle class and the upper stratum
of the low class. Again, in these two contiguous groups, which merge
into each other, those must be left out who, absorbed in their daily
occupations or professions, have no time or thought to give to public
matters, who have reached a fair position in the social hierarchy and
are not disposed to run risks, almost all of them well-established,
steady-going, mature, married folks who have sown their wild oats and
whom experience in life has rendered distrustful of themselves and of
theories. Overweening conceit is, most of the time, only average in the
average human being, so speculative ideas will with most people only
obtain a loose, transient and feeble hold. Moreover, in this society
which, for many centuries consists of people accustomed to being ruled,
the hereditary spirit is bourgeois that is to say, used to discipline,
fond of order, peaceable and even timid.--There remains a minority, a
very small one,[1201] innovating and restless. This consisted, on
the one hand, of people who were discontented with their calling
or profession, because they were of secondary or subaltern rank in
it.[1202] Some were debutantes not fully employed and others aspirants
for careers not yet entered upon. Then, on the other hand, there were
the men of unstable character and all those who were uprooted by the
immense upheaval of things: in the Church, through the suppression of
convents and through schism; in the judiciary, in the administration,
in the financial departments, in the army, and in various private and
public careers, through the reorganization of institutions, through the
novelty of fresh resources and occupations, and throug