We have seen how this was done and under what conditions, with what compliances and with what complicity, with what deference to clamorous opinion, with what docility in the presence of rioters, with what submission to the orders of the mob, with what a deluge of sentimental phrases and commonplace abstractions.

Sent to Paris as deputies, through the choice or toleration of the clubs, they bear along with them their politics and their rhetoric.

The result is an assemblage of narrow, perverted, hasty, inflated and feeble minds; at each daily session, twenty word-mills turn to no purpose, the greatest of public powers at once becoming a manufactory of nonsense, a school of extravagancies, and a theatre for declamation.
II .-- Degree and quality of their intelligence and Culture.
Is it possible that serious men could have listened to such weird nonsense until the bitter end?
"I am a tiller of the soil,"[2210] says one deputy, "I now dare speak of the antique nobility of my plow.

A yoke of oxen once constituted the pure, incorruptible legal worthies before whom my good ancestors executed their contracts, the authenticity of which, far better recorded on the soil than on flimsy parchment, is protected from any species of revolution whatever." Is it conceivable that the reporter of a law, that is about to exile or imprison forty thousand priests, should employ in an argument such silly bombast as the following ?[2211] "I have seen in the rural districts the hymeneal torch diffusing only pale and somber rays, or, transformed into the flambeaux of furies, the hideous skeleton of superstition seated even on the nuptial couch, placed between nature and the wedded, and arresting, etc....

Oh Rome, art thou satisfied?
Art thou then like Saturn, to whom fresh holocausts were daily imperative ?...