Neither, if you knew it, is Patriotism without her Constitution that can march; her not impotent Parliament; or call it, Ecumenic Council, and General-Assembly of the Jean-Jacques Churches:  the mother-society, namely!  Mother-Society with her three hundred full-grown Daughters; with what we can call little Granddaughters trying to walk, in every village of France, numerable, as Burke thinks, by the hundred thousand.  This is the true Constitution; made not by Twelve-Hundred august Senators, but by Nature herself; and has grown, unconsciously, out of the wants and the efforts of these Twenty-five Millions of men.  They are ’Lords of the Articles,’ our Jacobins; they originate debates for the Legislative; discuss Peace and War; settle beforehand what the Legislative is to do.  Greatly to the scandal of philosophical men, and of most Historians;—­who do in that judge naturally, and yet not wisely.  A Governing power must exist:  your other powers here are simulacra; this power is it.

Great is the Mother-Society:  She has had the honour to be denounced by Austrian Kaunitz; (Moniteur, Seance du 29 Mars, 1792.) and is all the dearer to Patriotism.  By fortune and valour, she has extinguished Feuillantism itself, at least the Feuillant Club.  This latter, high as it once carried its head, she, on the 18th of February, has the satisfaction to see shut, extinct; Patriots having gone thither, with tumult, to hiss it out of pain.  The Mother Society has enlarged her locality, stretches now over the whole nave of the Church.  Let us glance in, with the worthy Toulongeon, our old Ex-Constituent Friend, who happily has eyes to see:  ‘The nave of the Jacobins Church,’ says he, ’is changed into a vast Circus, the seats of which mount up circularly like an amphitheatre to the very groin of the domed roof.  A high Pyramid of black marble, built against one of the walls, which was formerly a funeral monument, has alone been left standing:  it serves now as back to the Office-bearers’ Bureau.  Here on an elevated Platform sit President and Secretaries, behind and above them the white Busts of Mirabeau, of Franklin, and various others, nay finally of Marat.  Facing this is the Tribune, raised till it is midway between floor and groin of the dome, so that the speaker’s voice may be in the centre.  From that point, thunder the voices which shake all Europe:  down below, in silence, are forging the thunderbolts and the firebrands.  Penetrating into this huge circuit, where all is out of measure, gigantic, the mind cannot repress some movement of terror and wonder; the imagination recals those dread temples which Poetry, of old, had consecrated to the Avenging Deities.’  (Toulongeon, ii. 124.)