But, after all, what can an unfortunate National Assembly do?  Consider only this, that there are Twelve Hundred miscellaneous individuals; not a unit of whom but has his own thinking-apparatus, his own speaking-apparatus!  In every unit of them is some belief and wish, different for each, both that France should be regenerated, and also that he individually should do it.  Twelve Hundred separate Forces, yoked miscellaneously to any object, miscellaneously to all sides of it; and bid pull for life!

Or is it the nature of National Assemblies generally to do, with endless labour and clangour, Nothing?  Are Representative Governments mostly at bottom Tyrannies too!  Shall we say, the Tyrants, the ambitious contentious Persons, from all corners of the country do, in this manner, get gathered into one place; and there, with motion and counter-motion, with jargon and hubbub, cancel one another, like the fabulous Kilkenny Cats; and produce, for net-result, zero;—­the country meanwhile governing or guiding itself, by such wisdom, recognised or for most part unrecognised, as may exist in individual heads here and there?—­Nay, even that were a great improvement:  for, of old, with their Guelf Factions and Ghibelline Factions, with their Red Roses and White Roses, they were wont to cancel the whole country as well.  Besides they do it now in a much narrower cockpit; within the four walls of their Assembly House, and here and there an outpost of Hustings and Barrel-heads; do it with tongues too, not with swords:—­all which improvements, in the art of producing zero, are they not great?  Nay, best of all, some happy Continents (as the Western one, with its Savannahs, where whosoever has four willing limbs finds food under his feet, and an infinite sky over his head) can do without governing.—­What Sphinx-questions; which the distracted world, in these very generations, must answer or die!

Chapter 1.6.II.

The Constituent Assembly.

One thing an elected Assembly of Twelve Hundred is fit for:  Destroying.  Which indeed is but a more decided 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.