Again, after the return from Varennes, when the Assembly finds out that the result of its labors is impracticable and wants to make it less democratic, the whole of the right side refuses to share in the debates, and, what is worse, votes with the revolutionaries to exclude the members of the Constituent from the Legislative Assembly.

Thus, not only does it abandon its own cause, but it commits self-destruction, and its desertion ends in suicide .-- A second party remains, "the middle party,"[2130] which consists of well-intentioned people from every class, sincere partisans of a good government; but, unfortunately, they have acquired their ideas of government from books, and are admirable on paper.

But as it happens that the men who live in the world are very different from imaginary men who dwell in the heads of philosophers, it is not to be wondered at if the systems taken out of books are fit for nothing but to be upset by another book.

Intellects of this stamp are the natural prey of utopians.
Lacking the ballast of experience they are carried away by pure logic and serve to enlarge the flock of theorists .-- The latter form the third party, which is called the "enrages (the wild men), and who, at the expiration of six months, find themselves "the most numerous of all." "It is composed," says Morris, "of that class which in America is known by the name of pettifogging lawyers, together with a host of curates and many of those persons who in all revolutions throng to the standard of change because they are not well.[2131] This last party is in close alliance with the populace and derives from this circumstance very great authority." All powerful passions are on its side, not merely the irritation of the people tormented by misery and suspicion, not merely the ambition and self-esteem of the bourgeois, in revolt against the ancient regime, but also the inveterate bitterness and fixed ideas of so many suffering minds and so many factious intellects, Protestants, Jansenists, economists, philosophers, men who, like Freteau, Rabout-Saint-Etienne, Volney, Sieyes, are hatching out a long arrears of resentments or hopes, and who only await the opportunity to impose their system with all the intolerance of dogmatism and of faith.

To minds of this stamp the past is a dead letter; example is no authority; realities are of no account; they live in their own Utopia.