ion was to sanction revolt. To
unite themselves with the factious, was to become factious themselves.
To restore royalty by the hands of a Barnave, was to degrade the king
even to gratitude towards a member of a faction. Their hopes had not
fallen so low that it was thus they had but the option of accepting a
character in a comedy of startled revolutionists. Their hopes were not
in any amelioration of present ill, but in its progress towards worse.
The very excess of disorder would punish disorder itself. The king was
at the Tuileries, but royalty was not there--it was at Coblentz, it was
on all the thrones of Europe. Monarchies were all in connection; they
knew very well how to restore the French monarchy without the fellowship
of those who had overturned it."

Thus reasoned the members of the right. Feelings and resentments closed
their ears to the counsels of moderation and wisdom, and the monarchy
was not less systematically pushed towards its catastrophe by the hand
of its friends than that of its enemies. The plan was abortive.

Whilst the captive king kept up a twofold understanding with his
emigrant brothers to learn the strength and inclination of foreign
powers, and with Barnave to attempt the conquest of the Assembly, the
Assembly itself lost its power; and the spirit of the Revolution,
quitting the place in which it had no longer any hopes, went to excite
the clubs and municipalities, and bestow its energies on the elections.
The Assembly had committed the fault of declaring its members not
re-eligible for the new legislature. This act of renunciation of itself,
which resembled the heroism of disinterestedness, was in reality the
sacrifice of the country; it was the ostracism of superior power, and an
assurance of triumph to mediocrity. A nation how rich soever in genius
and virtue, never possesses more than a definite number of great
citizens. Nature is chary of superiority. The social conditions
necessary to form a public man are rarely in combination. Intelligence,
clear-sightedness, virtue, character, independence, leisure, fortune,
consideration already acquired, and devotion,--all this is seldom united
in one individual. An entire society is not decapitated with impunity.
Nations are like their soil: after having pared off the vegetable earth,
we find only the sand beneath, and that is unproductive. The Constituent
Assembly had forgotten this truth, or rather its abdication had assumed
the form of a v