Three days after their assembling together they vote, "almost unanimously," the preparation of a law "against the instigators of murder and assassination." "Almost unanimously," they desire to raise a guard, recruited in the 83 departments, against the armed bands of Paris and the Commune.

Petition is elected as their first president by "almost the totality of suffrages." Roland who has just read his report to them, is greeted with the "loudest" applause from nearly the "entire" Assembly.
In short they are for the ideal republic against actual brigands.

This accounts for their ranging themselves around those upright and sincere deputies, who, in the two preceding Assemblies or alongside of them, were the ablest defenders of both principles and humanity, around Buzot, Lanjuinais, Petition, and Rabaut-Saint-Etienne; around Brissot, Vergniaud, Guadet, Gensonne, Isnard, and Condorcet; around Roland, Louvet, Barbaroux, and the five hundred deputies of the "Plain,"[3335] marching in one body under the leadership of the 180 Girondists who now form the "Right."[3336] These latter, among the republicans, are the most sincere and have the most faith; for they have long been such, after much thought, study and as a matter of principle.

Nearly all of them are well-read educated men, reasoners, philosophers, disciples of Diderot or of Rousseau, satisfied that absolute truth had been revealed by their masters, thoroughly imbued with the Encyclopedie[3337] or the Contrat Social, the same as the Puritans formerly were with the Bible.[3338] At the age when the mind is maturing, and fondly clings to general ideas,[3339] they embraced the theory and aimed at a reconstruction of society according to abstract principles.

They have accordingly set to work as pure logicians, rigorously applying the superficial and false system of analysis then in vogue.[3340] They have formed for themselves an idea of man in general, the same in all times and ages, an extract or minimum of man; they have pondered over several thousands of or millions of these abstract mortals, erected their imaginary wills into primordial rights, and drawn up in anticipation the chimerical contract which is to regulate their impossible union.