All the better for France should this accord prove complete and permanent; all the worse for France should it prove partial and temporary.

It is a terrible risk, but inevitable.

There is no escape from anarchy except through despotism, with the chance of encountering in one man, at first a savior and then a destroyer, with the certainty of henceforth belonging to an unknown will fashioned by genius and good sense, or by imagination and egoism, in a soul fiery and disturbed by the temptations of absolute power, by success and universal adulation, in a despot responsible to no one but himself, in a conqueror condemned by the impulses of conquest to regard himself and the world under a light growing falser and falser.
Such are the bitter fruits of social dissolution: the authority of the state will either perish or become perverted; each uses it for his own purposes, and nobody is disposed to entrust it to an external arbitrator, and the usurpers who seize it only remain trustee on condition that they abuse it; when it works in their hands it is only to work against its office.

It must be accepted when, for want of better or fear of worse, through a final usurpation, it falls into the only hands able to restore it, organize it, and apply it at last to the service of the public.
***** [Footnote 2101: "The Revolution," P.193 and following pages, also p.224 and following pages.

The provisions of the constitution of the year III, somewhat less anarchical, are analogous; those of the "Mountain" constitution (year II) are so anarchical that nobody thought of enforcing them.] [Footnote 2102: "The Revolution," vol.III., pp.446, 450, 476.] [Footnote 2103: Sauzay, "Histoire de la persecution revolutionnaire dans le departement du Doubs," X., 472 (Speech of Briot to the five-hundred, Aug.29, 1799): "The country seeks in vain for its children; it finds the chouans, the Jacobins, the moderates, and the constitutionalists of '91 and '93, clubbists, the amnestied, fanatics, scissionists and antiscissionists; in vain does it call for republicans."] [Footnote 2104: "The Revolution," III., 427, 474 .-- Rocquain, "L'etat de la France au 18 Brumaire," 360, 362: "Inertia or absence of the national agents.