al and practicable politics. They
were the principles to which competent onlookers like Jefferson and
Morris had expected the Assembly to conform, but to which the Assembly
never conformed for an instant. It was on the principles of rational
politics that Fox and Sheridan admired it. On these principles
Burke condemned it. He declared that the methods of the Constituent
Assembly, up to the summer of 1790, were unjust, precipitate,
destructive, and without stability. Men had chosen to build their
house on the sands, and the winds and the seas would speedily beat
against it and overthrow it.

His prophecy was fulfilled to the letter. What is still more important
for the credit of his foresight is, that not only did his prophecy
come true, but it came true for the reasons that he had fixed upon. It
was, for instance, the constitution of the Church, in which Burke
saw the worst of the many bad mistakes of the Assembly. History, now
slowly shaking herself free from the passions of a century, agrees
that the civil constitution of the clergy was the measure which, more
than any other, decisively put an end to whatever hopes there might
have been of a peaceful transition from the old order to the new.
A still more striking piece of foresight is the prediction of the
despotism of the Napoleonic Empire. Burke had compared the levelling
policy of the Assembly in their geometrical division of the
departments, and their isolation from one another of the bodies of
the state, to the treatment which a conquered country receives at the
hands of its conquerors. Like Romans in Greece or Macedon, the French
innovators had destroyed the bonds of union, under colour of providing
for the independence of each of their cities. "If the present project
of a Republic should fail," Burke said, with a prescience really
profound, "all securities to a moderate freedom fail with it. All the
indirect restraints which mitigate despotism are removed; insomuch
that, if monarchy should ever again obtain an entire ascendancy in
France under this or any other dynasty, it will probably be, if not
voluntarily tempered at setting out by the wise and virtuous counsels
of the prince, the most completely arbitrary power that ever appeared
on earth." Almost at the same moment Mirabeau was secretly writing to
the king that their plan of reducing all citizens to a single
class would have delighted Richelieu. This equal surface, he said,
facilitates the exercise of po