rs, writing songs, and playing the flute.--After this
amalgamation of classes and this transfer of parts what remains of
the superiority of the nobles? By what special merit, through what
recognized capacity are they to secure respect of a member of the
Third-Estate? Outside of fashionable elegance and a few points of
breeding, in what respect they differ from him? What superior education,
what familiarity with affairs, what experience with government, what
political instruction, what local ascendancy, what moral authority can
be alleged to sanction their pretensions to the highest places?--In the
way of practice, the Third-Estate already does the work, providing the
qualified men, the intendants, the ministerial head-clerks, the lay and
ecclesiastical administrators, the competent laborers of all kinds and
degrees. Call to mind the Marquis of whom we have just spoken, a former
captain in the French guards, a man of feeling and of loyalty, admitting
at the elections of 1789 that "the knowledge essential to a deputy
would most generally be found in the Third-Estate, the mind there being
accustomed to business."--In the way of theory: the commoner is as
well-informed as the noble, and he thinks he is still better informed,
because, having read the same books and arrived at the same principles,
he does not, like him, stop half-way on the road to their consequences,
but plunges headlong to the very depths of the doctrine, convinced that
his logic is clairvoyance and that he is more enlightened because he is
the least prejudiced.--Consider the young men who, about twenty years of
age in 1780, born in industrious families, accustomed to effort and able
to work twelve hours a day, a Barnave, a Carnot, a Roederer, a Merlin de
Thionville, a Robespierre, an energetic stock, feeling their strength,
criticizing their rivals, aware of their weakness, comparing their own
application and education to their levity and incompetence, and, at
the moment when youthful ambition stirs within them, seeing themselves
excluded in advance from any superior position, consigned for life to
subaltern employment, and subjected in every career to the precedence
of superiors who they hardly recognize as their equals. At the artillery
examinations where Cherin, the genealogist, refuses commoners, and where
the Abbe Bosen, a mathematician, rejects the ignorant, it is discovered
that capacity is wanting among the noble pupils and nobility among the
capable