erish than that
his work should be lost.

Thus it is that the Revolution has become a date in the human mind, and
not merely an event in the history of the people. The men of the
Constituent Assembly were not Frenchmen, they were universal men. We
mistake, we vilify them when we consider them only as priests,
aristocrats, plebeians, faithful subjects, malcontents or demagogues.
They were, and they felt themselves to be, better than that,--workmen of
God; called by him to restore social reason, and found right and justice
throughout the universe. None of them, except those who opposed the
Revolution, limited the extent of its thought to the boundaries of
France. The declaration of the Rights of Man proves this. It was the
decalogue of the human race in all languages. The modern Revolution
called the Gentiles, as well as the Jews, to partake of the light and
reign of Fraternity.

II.

Thus, not one of its apostles who did not proclaim peace amongst
nations. Mirabeau, La Fayette, Robespierre himself erased war from the
symbol which they presented to the nation. It was the malcontent and
ambitious who subsequently demanded it, and not the leading
Revolutionists. When war burst out the Revolution had degenerated. The
Constituent Assembly took care not to place on the frontiers of France
the boundaries of its truths, and to limit the sympathising soul of the
French Revolution to a narrow patriotism. The globe was the country of
its dogmata. France was only the workshop; it worked for all other
people. Respectful of, or indifferent to, the question of national
territories, from the first moment it forbade conquest. It only reserved
to itself the property, or rather the invention of universal truths
which it brought to light. As vast as humanity, it had not the
selfishness to isolate itself. It desired to give, and not to deprive.
It sought to spread itself by right, and not by force. Essentially
spiritual, it sought no other empire for France than the voluntary
empire which imitation by the human mind conferred upon it.

Its work was prodigious, its means a nullity; all that enthusiasm can
inspire, the Assembly undertook and perfected, without a king, without a
military leader, without a dictator, without an army, without any other
strength than deep conviction. Alone, in the midst of an amazed people,
with a disbanded army, an emigrating aristocracy, a despoiled clergy, a
conspiring court, a seditious city, hostile Eur