The session terminates without further accident or omen than this; with
which, significantly enough, France has opened her States-General.

BOOK 1.V.

THE THIRD ESTATE

Chapter 1.5.I.

Inertia.

That exasperated France, in this same National Assembly of hers, has
got something, nay something great, momentous, indispensable, cannot be
doubted; yet still the question were: Specially what? A question hard
to solve, even for calm onlookers at this distance; wholly insoluble to
actors in the middle of it. The States-General, created and conflated by
the passionate effort of the whole nation, is there as a thing high and
lifted up. Hope, jubilating, cries aloud that it will prove a miraculous
Brazen Serpent in the Wilderness; whereon whosoever looks, with faith
and obedience, shall be healed of all woes and serpent-bites.

We may answer, it will at least prove a symbolic Banner; round which the
exasperating complaining Twenty-Five Millions, otherwise isolated and
without power, may rally, and work--what it is in them to work. If
battle must be the work, as one cannot help expecting, then shall it
be a battle-banner (say, an Italian Gonfalon, in its old Republican
Carroccio); and shall tower up, car-borne, shining in the wind: and with
iron tongue peal forth many a signal. A thing of prime necessity; which
whether in the van or in the centre, whether leading or led and driven,
must do the fighting multitude incalculable services. For a season,
while it floats in the very front, nay as it were stands solitary
there, waiting whether force will gather round it, this same National
Carroccio, and the signal-peals it rings, are a main object with us.

The omen of the 'slouch-hats clapt on' shows the Commons Deputies to
have made up their minds on one thing: that neither Noblesse nor Clergy
shall have precedence of them; hardly even Majesty itself. To such
length has the Contrat Social, and force of public opinion, carried
us. For what is Majesty but the Delegate of the Nation; delegated, and
bargained with (even rather tightly),--in some very singular posture of
affairs, which Jean Jacques has not fixed the date of?

Coming therefore into their Hall, on the morrow, an inorganic mass
of Six Hundred individuals, these Commons Deputies perceive, without
terror, that they have it all to themselves. Their Hall is also the
Grand or general Hall for all the Three Orders. But the Noblesse and
Clergy, it would seem, have re