In conformity with the fashion of the time it works by deduction, after the method of Rousseau, according to an abstract notion of right, of the State and of the social compact.[2126] According to this process, by virtue of political geometry alone, they shall have the perfect vessel and since it perfect it follows that it will sail, and that much better than any empirical craft .-- They legislate according to this principle, and one may imagine the nature of their discussions.
There are no convincing facts, no pointed arguments; nobody would ever imagine that the speakers were gathered together to conduct real business.

Through speech after speech, strings of hollow abstractions are endlessly renewed as in a meeting of students in rhetoric for the purpose of practice, or in a society of old bookworms for their own amusement.

On the question of the veto "each orator in turn, armed with his portfolio, reads a dissertation which has no bearing whatever" on the preceding one, which makes a "sort of academical session,"[2127] a succession of pamphlets fresh every morning for several days.

On the question of the Rights of Man fifty-four speakers are placed on the list.
"I remember," says Dumont, "that long discussion, which lasted for weeks, as a period of deadly boredom,--vain disputes over words, a metaphysical jumble, and most tedious babble; the Assembly was turned into a Sorbonne lecture-room," and all this while chateaux were burning, while town-halls were being sacked, and courts dared no longer hold assize, while the distribution of wheat was stopped, and while society was in course of dissolution.

In the same manner the theologians of the Easter Roman Empire kept up their wrangles about the uncreated light of Mount Tabor while Mahomet II was battering the walls of Constantinople with his cannon .-- Ours, of course, are another sort of men, juvenile in feeling, sincere, enthusiastic, even generous, and further, more devoted, laborious, and in some cases endowed with rare talent.