appointed nor dismissed nor controlled. The king was deprived of
administrative power, as he had been deprived of legislative power.
That distrust, reasonable in the old regime, ought to have ceased,
when the Ministers appointed by the king were deputies presented by
the Assembly. That was the idea by which Mirabeau would have preserved
the Revolution from degenerating through excess of decentralisation
into tyranny. As a Minister, he might have saved the Constitution. It
is not to the discredit of the Assembly that the horror which his life
inspired made his genius inefficient, and that their labours failed
because they deemed him too bad for power.

If Mirabeau is tried by the test of public morals, the only standard
of political conduct on which men may be expected to agree, the
verdict cannot be doubtful. His ultimate policy was one vast intrigue,
and he avowedly strove to do evil that good might come. The thing is
hardly less infamous in the founder of the Left Centre than in Maury
and his unscrupulous colleagues of the Right. There was at no time a
prospect of success, for he never had the king or the queen for one
moment with him.

The answer is different if we try him by a purely political test, and
ask whether he desired power for the whole or freedom for the parts.
Mirabeau was not only a friend of freedom, which is a term to be
defined, but a friend of federalism, which both Montesquieu and
Rousseau regarded as the condition of freedom. When he spoke
confidentially, he said that there was no other way in which a great
country like France could be free. If in this he was sincere, and I
believe that he was sincere, he deserves the great place he holds in
the memory of his countrymen.

XI

SIEYES AND THE CONSTITUTION CIVILE

Before coming to the conflict between Church and State, with which the
legislation of 1790 closes, I must speak of a man memorable far beyond
Mirabeau in the history of political thought and political action, who
is the most perfect representative of the Revolution. I mean the Abbe
Sieyes. As a priest without a vocation, he employed himself with
secular studies, and mastered and meditated the French and the English
writers of the age, politicians, economists, and philosophers.
Learning from many, he became the disciple of none, and was thoroughly
independent, looking beyond the horizon of his century, and farther
than his own favourites, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Turgot. He