These two forces, radical dogma and brute force, are the successors and executors of the Ancient regime, and, on contemplating the way in which this regime engendered, brought forth, nourished, installed and stimulated them we cannot avoid considering its history as one long suicide, like that of a man who, having mounted to the top of an immense ladder, cuts away from under his feet the support which has kept him up. — In a case of this kind good intentions are not sufficient; to be liberal and even generous, to enter upon a few semi-reforms, is of no avail.  On the contrary, through both their qualities and defects, through both their virtues and their vices, the privileged wrought their own destruction, their merits contributing to their ruin as well as their faults. — Founders of society, formerly entitled to their advantages through their services, they have preserved their rank without fulfilling their duties; their position in the local as in the central government is a sinecure, and their privileges have become abuses.  At their head, a king, creating France by devoting himself to her as if his own property, ended by sacrificing her as if his own property; the public purse is his private purse, while passions, vanities, personal weaknesses, luxurious habits, family solicitudes, the intrigues of a mistress and the caprices of a wife, govern a state of twenty-six millions of men with an arbitrariness, a heedlessness, a prodigality, a lack of skill, an absence of consistency that would scarcely be overlooked in the management of a private domain. — The king and the privileged excel in one direction, in manners, in good taste, in fashion, in the talent for representation and in entertaining and receiving, in the gift of graceful conversation, in finesse and in gaiety, in the art of converting life into a brilliant and ingenious festivity, regarding the world as a drawing room of refined idlers in which it suffices to be amiable and witty, whilst, actually, it is an arena where one must be strong for combats, and a laboratory in which one must work in order to be useful. — Through the habit, perfection and sway of polished intercourse they stamped on the French intellect a classic form, which, combined with recent scientific acquisitions, produced the philosophy of the eighteenth century, the disrepute of tradition, the ambition of recasting all human institutions according to the sole dictates of Reason, the appliance of mathematical methods to politics and morals, the catechism of the Rights of Man, and other dogmas of anarchical and despotic character in the Contrat social. — Once this chimera is born they welcome it as a drawing room fancy; they use the little monster as a plaything, as yet innocent and decked with ribbons like a pastoral lambkin; they never dream of its becoming a raging, formidable brute; they nourish it, and caress it, and then, opening their doors, they let it descend into the streets. — Here among the middle