d exercise of its natural talent for
Doing Nothing. Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating; and things
will destroy themselves.

So and not otherwise proved it with an august National Assembly. It
took the name, Constituent, as if its mission and function had been to
construct or build; which also, with its whole soul, it endeavoured
to do: yet, in the fates, in the nature of things, there lay for it
precisely of all functions the most opposite to that. Singular, what
Gospels men will believe; even Gospels according to Jean Jacques! It
was the fixed Faith of these National Deputies, as of all thinking
Frenchmen, that the Constitution could be made; that they, there and
then, were called to make it. How, with the toughness of Old Hebrews or
Ishmaelite Moslem, did the otherwise light unbelieving People persist in
this their Credo quia impossibile; and front the armed world with
it; and grow fanatic, and even heroic, and do exploits by it! The
Constituent Assembly's Constitution, and several others, will, being
printed and not manuscript, survive to future generations, as an
instructive well-nigh incredible document of the Time: the most
significant Picture of the then existing France; or at lowest, Picture
of these men's Picture of it.

But in truth and seriousness, what could the National Assembly have
done? The thing to be done was, actually as they said, to regenerate
France; to abolish the old France, and make a new one; quietly or
forcibly, by concession or by violence, this, by the Law of Nature, has
become inevitable. With what degree of violence, depends on the wisdom
of those that preside over it. With perfect wisdom on the part of the
National Assembly, it had all been otherwise; but whether, in any wise,
it could have been pacific, nay other than bloody and convulsive, may
still be a question.

Grant, meanwhile, that this Constituent Assembly does to the last
continue to be something. With a sigh, it sees itself incessantly
forced away from its infinite divine task, of perfecting 'the Theory of
Irregular Verbs,'--to finite terrestrial tasks, which latter have still
a significance for us. It is the cynosure of revolutionary France, this
National Assembly. All work of Government has fallen into its hands,
or under its control; all men look to it for guidance. In the middle
of that huge Revolt of Twenty-five millions, it hovers always aloft
as Carroccio or Battle-Standard, impelling and impelled, in the most