Never has so much been said to so little purpose; all the truth that is uttered is drowned in the monotony and inflation of empty verbiage and vociferous bombast.

One experience in this direction is sufficient.[1117] The historian who resorts this mass of rubbish for accurate information finds none of any account; in vain will he read kilometers of it: hardly will he there meet one fact, one instructive detail, one document which brings before his eyes a distinct personality, which shows him the real sentiments of a villager or of a gentleman, which vividly portrays the interior of a hotel-de-ville, of a soldier's barracks, of a municipal chamber, or the character of an insurrection.

To define fifteen or twenty types and situations which sum up the history of the period, we have been and shall be obliged to seek them elsewhere--in the correspondence of local administrators, in affidavits on criminal records, in confidential reports of the police,[1118] and in the narratives of foreigners,[1119] who, prepared for it by a different education, look behind words for things, and see France beyond the "Contrat Social." This teeming France, this grand tragedy which twenty-six millions of players are performing on a stage of 26 000 square leagues, is lost to the Jacobin.

His literature, as well as his brain, contain only insubstantial generalizations like those above cited, rolling out in a mere play of ideas, sometimes in concise terms when the writer happens to be a professional reasoner like Condorcet, but most frequently in a tangled, knotty style full of loose and disconnected meshes when the spokesman happens to be an improvised politician or a philosophic tyro like the ordinary deputies of the Assembly and the speakers of the clubs.

It is a pedantic scholasticism set forth with fanatical rant.