What will justify such a volte-face and with what excuse can he repudiate the principles with which he justified his takeover ?--He takes good care not to repudiate them; it would drive the already rebellious provinces to extremes; on the contrary, he proclaims them with renewed vigor, through which move the ignorant crowd, seeing the same flask always presented to it, imagines that it is always served with the same liquor, and is thus forced to drink tyranny under the label of freedom.

Whatever the charlatan can do with his labels, signboards, shouting and lies for the next six months, will be done to disguise the new nostrum; so much the worse for the public if, later on, it discovers that the draught is bitter; sooner or later it must swallow it, willingly or by compulsion: for, in the interval, the instruments are being got ready to force it down the public throat.[1103] As a beginning, the Constitution, so long anticipated and so often promised, is hastily fabricated:[1104] declarations of rights in thirty-five articles, the Constitutional bill in one hundred and twenty-four articles, political principles and institutions of every sort, electoral, legislative, executive, administrative, judicial, financial and military;[1105] in three weeks all is drawn up and passed on the double .-- Of course, the new Constitutionalists do not propose to produce an effective and serviceable instrument; that is the least of their worries.

Herault Sechelles, the reporter of the bill, writes on the 7th of June, "to have procured for him at once the laws of Minos, of which he has urgent need;" very urgent need, as he must hand in the Constitution that week.[1106] Such circumstance is sufficiently characteristic of both the workmen and the work.

All is mere show and pretense.

Some of the workmen are shrewd politicians whose sole object is to furnish the public with words instead of realities; others, ordinary scribblers of abstractions, or even ignoramuses, and unable to distinguish words from reality, imagine that they are framing laws by stringing together a lot of phrases .-- It is not a difficult job; the phrases are ready-made to hand.