arely will a Secretary of the Treasury propose an
expenditure for which there is not a sufficient revenue, or a system of
taxation that provides no returns. Placed where full information can
be procured, daily advised of every details, surrounded by skillful
counselors and expert clerks, the chiefs of the majority, who thus
become heads of the administration, immediately drop theory for
practice; and the fumes of political speculation must be pretty dense
in their minds if they exclude the multiplied rays of light which
experience constantly sheds upon them. Let the most stubborn of
theorists take his stand at the helm of a ship, and, whatever be the
obstinacy of his principles or his prejudices, he will never, unless he
is blind or led by the blind, persist in steering always to the right
or always to the left. Just so after the flight to Varennes, when the
Assembly, in full possession of the executive power, directly controls
the Ministry, it comes to recognize for itself that its constitutional
machine will not work, except in the way of destruction; and it is the
principal revolutionaries, Barnave, Duport, the Lameths, Chapelier, and
Thouret,[2147] who undertake to make alterations in the mechanisms so
as to lessen its friction. But this source of knowledge and reason,
however, to which they are momentarily induced to draw, in spite of
themselves and too late, has been turned off by themselves from the very
beginning. On the 6th of November, 1789, in deference to principle
and in dread of corruption, the Assembly had declared that none of
its members should hold ministerial office. We see it in consequence
deprived of all the instruction which comes from direct contact with
affairs, surrendered without any counterpoise to the seductions
of theory, reduced by its own decision to become a mere academy of
legislation only.

Nay, still worse, through another effect of the same error, it condemns
itself by its own act to constant fits of panic. For, having allowed
the power which it was not willing to assume to slip into indifferent or
suspect hands, it is always uneasy, and all its decrees bear an uniform
stamp, not only of the willful ignorance within which it confines
itself, but also of the exaggerated or chimerical fears in which its
life is passed.--Imagine a ship conveying a company of lawyers, literary
men, and other passengers, who, supported by a mutinous and poorly fed
crew, take full command, but refuse to se