of doing and living:  no text truer than this; which will hold true from the Tea-table and Tailor’s shopboard up to the High Senate-houses, Solemn Temples; nay through all provinces of Mind and Imagination, onwards to the outmost confines of articulate Being,—­Ubi homines sunt modi sunt!  There are modes wherever there are men.  It is the deepest law of man’s nature; whereby man is a craftsman and ‘tool-using animal;’ not the slave of Impulse, Chance, and Brute Nature, but in some measure their lord.  Twenty-five millions of men, suddenly stript bare of their modi, and dancing them down in that manner, are a terrible thing to govern!

Eloquent Patriots of the Legislative, meanwhile, have precisely this problem to solve.  Under the name and nickname of ’statesmen, hommes d’etat,’ of ‘moderate-men, moderantins,’ of Brissotins, Rolandins, finally of Girondins, they shall become world-famous in solving it.  For the Twenty-five millions are Gallic effervescent too;—­filled both with hope of the unutterable, of universal Fraternity and Golden Age; and with terror of the unutterable, Cimmerian Europe all rallying on us.  It is a problem like few.  Truly, if man, as the Philosophers brag, did to any extent look before and after, what, one may ask, in many cases would become of him?  What, in this case, would become of these Seven Hundred and Forty-nine men?  The Convention, seeing clearly before and after, were a paralysed Convention.  Seeing clearly to the length of its own nose, it is not paralysed.

To the Convention itself neither the work nor the method of doing it is doubtful:  To make the Constitution; to defend the Republic till that be made.  Speedily enough, accordingly, there has been a ’Committee of the Constitution’ got together.  Sieyes, Old-Constituent, Constitution-builder by trade; Condorcet, fit for better things; Deputy Paine, foreign Benefactor of the Species, with that ’red carbuncled face, and the black beaming eyes;’ Herault de Sechelles, Ex-Parlementeer, one of the handsomest men in France:  these, with inferior guild-brethren, are girt cheerfully to the work; will once more ‘make the Constitution;’ let us hope, more effectually than last time.  For that the Constitution can be made, who doubts,—­unless the Gospel of Jean Jacques came into the world in vain?  True, our last Constitution did tumble within the year, so lamentably.  But what then, except sort the rubbish and boulders, and build them up again better?  ’Widen your basis,’ for one thing,—­to Universal Suffrage, if need be; exclude rotten materials, Royalism and such like, for another thing.  And in brief, build, O unspeakable Sieyes and Company, unwearied!  Frequent perilous downrushing of scaffolding and rubble-work, be that an irritation, no discouragement.  Start ye always again, clearing aside the wreck; if with broken limbs, yet with whole hearts; and build, we say, in the name of Heaven,—­till either the work do stand; or else mankind abandon it, and the Constitution-builders be paid off, with laughter and tears!  One good time, in the course of Eternity, it was appointed that this of Social Contract too should try itself out.  And so the Committee of Constitution shall toil:  with hope and faith;—­with no disturbance from any reader of these pages.