In obtaining and securing their power, the Assembly proceeds upon principles the most opposite from those which appear to direct them in the use of it.  An observation on this difference will let us into the true spirit of their conduct.  Everything which they have done, or continue to do, in order to obtain and keep their power, is by the most common arts.  They proceed exactly as their ancestors of ambition have done before them.  Trace them through all their artifices, frauds, and violences, you can find nothing at all that is new.  They follow precedents and examples with the punctilious exactness of a pleader.  They never depart an iota from the authentic formulas of tyranny and usurpation.  But in all the regulations relative to the public good the spirit has been the very reverse of this.  There they commit the whole to the mercy of untried speculations; they abandon the dearest interests of the public to those loose theories to which none of them would choose to trust the slightest of his private concerns.  They make this difference, because in their desire of obtaining and securing power they are thoroughly in earnest; there they travel in the beaten road.  The public interests, because about them they have no real solicitude, they abandon wholly to chance:  I say to chance, because their schemes have nothing in experience to prove their tendency beneficial.

We must always see with a pity not unmixed with respect the errors of those who are timid and doubtful of themselves with regard to points wherein the happiness of mankind is concerned.  But in these gentlemen there is nothing of the tender parental solicitude which fears to cut up the infant for the sake of an experiment.  In the vastness of their promises and the confidence of their predictions they far outdo all the boasting of empirics.  The arrogance of their pretensions in a manner provokes and challenges us to an inquiry into their foundation.

I am convinced that there are men of considerable parts among the popular leaders in the National Assembly.  Some of them display eloquence in their speeches and their writings.  This cannot be without powerful and cultivated talents.  But eloquence may exist without a proportionable degree of wisdom.  When I speak of ability, I am obliged to distinguish.  What they have done towards the support of their system bespeaks no ordinary men.  In the system itself, taken as the scheme of a republic constructed for procuring the prosperity and security of the citizen, and for promoting the strength and grandeur of the state, I confess myself unable to find out anything which displays, in a single instance, the work of a comprehensive and disposing mind, or even the provisions of a vulgar prudence.  Their purpose everywhere seems to have been to evade and slip aside from difficulty.  This it has been the glory of the great masters in all the arts to confront, and to overcome,—­and when they had overcome the first difficulty, to turn