After this pattern several million individuals, all precisely alike, have been prepared while, through a second simplification, as extraordinary as the first one, they are all supposed to be free and all equal, without a past, without kindred, without responsibility, without traditions, without customs, like so many mathematical units, all separable and all equivalent, and then it is imagined that, assembled together for the first time, these proceed to make their primitive bargain.

From the nature they are supposed to possess and the situation in which they are placed, no difficulty is found in deducing their interests, their wills, and the contract between them.

But if this contract suits them, it does not follow that it suits others.

On the contrary, if follows that is does not suit others; the inconvenience becomes extreme on its being imposed on a living society; the measure of that inconvenience will be the immensity of the distance which divides a hollow abstraction, a philosophical phantom, an empty insubstantial image from the real and complete man.
In any event we are not here considering a specimen, so reduced and mutilated as to be only an outline of a human being; no, we are to the contrary considering Frenchmen of the year 1789.

It is for them alone that the constitution is being made: it is therefore they alone who should be considered; they are manifestly men of a particular species, having their peculiar temperament, their special aptitudes, their own inclinations, their religion, their history, all adding up into a mental and moral structure, hereditary and deeply rooted, bequeathed to them by the indigenous stock, and to which every great event, each political or literary phase for twenty centuries, has added a growth, a transformation or a custom.