perfectly convinced of the superfluity of the throne in a national
government, had only placed a king at the summit of its institutions to
check ambition, and that the kingdom should not be called a republic.
The only part of such a king was to prevent the truth from appearing,
and to make a show in the eyes of a people accustomed to a sceptre. This
fiction, or this nullity cost the people 30,000,000 (of francs) a year
in the civil list, a court, continual jealousies, and the interminable
corruption practised by the court on the organs of the nation. This was
the real vice of the constitution of 1791: it was not consistent.
Royalty embarrassed the constitution; and all that embarrasses injures.
The motive of this inconsistency was less an error of its reason than a
respectful piety for an ancient prejudice, and a generous tenderness
towards a race which had long worn the crown. If the race of the
Bourbons had been extinct in the month of September 1791, certainly the
Constituent Assembly would not have invented a king.

V.

However, the royalty of '91, very little different from the royalty of
to-day, could work for a century, as well as a day. The error of all
historians is to attribute to the vices of the constitution the brief
duration of the work of the Constituent Assembly. In the first place,
the work of the Constituent Assembly was not principally to perpetuate
this wheelwork of useless royalty, placed out of complaisance to the
people's eyes, in machinery which did not regulate it. The work of the
Constituent Assembly was the regeneration of ideas and government, the
displacing of power, the restoration of right, the abolition of all
subjugation even of the mind, the freedom of consciences, the formation
of an administration; and this work lasts, and will endure as long as
the name of France. The vice of the institution of 1791 was not in any
one particular point. It has not perished because the _veto_ of the king
was suspensive instead of absolute; it has not perished, because the
right of peace or war was taken from the king, and reserved to the
nation; it has not perished, because it did not place the legislative
power in one chamber only instead of in two: these asserted vices are to
be found in many other constitutions, which still endure. The diminution
of the royal power was not the main danger to royalty in '91; it was
rather its salvation, if it could have been saved.

VI.

The more power was g