By means of eight or ten ready-made sentences, found in the six-penny catechisms circulated by thousands in the country and in the suburbs of the towns and cities,[1112] a village attorney, a customs clerk, a theater attendant, a sergeant of a soldier's mess, becomes a legislator and philosopher.

He criticizes Malouet, Mirabeau, the Ministry, the King, the Assembly, the Church, foreign Cabinets, France, and all Europe.

Consequently, on these important subjects, which always seemed forever forbidden to him, he offers resolutions, reads addresses, makes harangues, obtains applause, and congratulates himself on having argued so well and with such big words.

To hold fort on questions that are not understood is now an occupation, a matter of pride and profit.
"More is uttered in one day," says an eye-witness,[1113] "in one section of Paris than in one year in all the Swiss political assemblies put together.

An Englishman would give six weeks of study to what we dispose of in a quarter of an hour." Everywhere, in the town halls, in popular meetings, in the sectional assemblies, in the wine shops, on the public promenades, on street corners vanity erects a tribune of verbosity.
"Contemplate the incalculable activity of such a machine in a loquacious nation where the passion for being something dominates all other affections, where vanity has more phases than there are starts in the firmament, where reputations already cost no more than the trouble of insisting on their being deserved, where society is divided between mediocrities and their trumpeters who laud them as divinities; where so few people are content with their lot, where the corner grocer is prouder of his epaulette than the Grand Conde of his Marshal's baton, where agitation without object or resources is perpetual, where, from the floor-scrubber to the dramatist, from the academician to the simpleton who gets muddled over the evening newspaper, from the witty courtier down to his philosophic lackey, each one revises Montesquieu with the self-sufficiency of a child which, because it is learning to read, deems itself wise; where self-esteem, in disputation, caviling and sophistication, destroys all sensible conversation; where no one utters a word, but to teach, never imagining that to learn one must keep quiet; where the triumphs of a few lunatics entice every crackbrain from his den; where, with two nonsensical ideas put together out of a book that is not understood, a man assumes to have principles; where swindlers talk about morality, women of easy virtue about civism, and the most infamous of beings about the dignity of the species; where the discharged valet of a grand seignior calls himself Brutus!" -- In reality, he is Brutus in his own eyes.