CHAPTER II.
I .-- Composition of the Legislative Assembly.
Social rank of the Deputies.

Their inexperience, incompetence, and prejudices.
If it be true that a nation should be represented by its superior men, France was strangely represented during the Revolution.

From one Assembly to another we see the level steadily declining; especially is the fall very great from the Constituent to the Legislative Assembly.
The actors entitled to perform withdraw just as they begin to understand their parts; and yet more, they have excluded themselves from the theatre, while the stage is surrendered to their substitutes.
"The preceding Assembly," writes an ambassador,[2201] "contained men of great talent, large fortune, and honorable name, a combination which had an imposing effect on the people, although violently opposed to personal distinctions.

The actual Assembly is but little more than a council of lawyers, got together from every town and village in France." In actual fact, out of 745 deputies, indeed, "400 lawyers belong, for the most part, to the dregs of the profession"; there are about twenty constitutional priests, "as many poets and literary men of but little reputation, almost all without any fortune," the greater number being less than thirty years old, sixty being less than twenty-six,[2202] nearly all of them trained in the clubs and the popular assemblies".
There is not one noble or prelate belonging to the ancient regime, no great landed proprietor,[2203] no head of a service, no eminent specialist in diplomacy, in finance, in the administrative or military arts.

But three general officers are found there, and these are of the lower rank,[2204] one of them having held his appointment but three months, and the other two being wholly unknown .-- At the head of the diplomatic committee stands Brissot, itinerant journalist, lately traveling about in England and the United States.