onial, imagine it a copy of the Parliament of
France.--The mechanism of free constitutions, or the conditions of
effective liberty, that is too complicated a question. Montesquieu, save
in the great magisterial families, is antiquated for twenty years past.
Of what avail are studies of ancient France? "What is the result of so
much and such profound research? Laborious conjecture and reasons for
doubting."[4353] It is much more convenient to start with the rights of
man and to deduce the consequences. Schoolboy logic suffices for that to
which collegiate rhetoric supplies the tirades.--In this great void of
enlightenment the vague terms of liberty, equality and the sovereignty
of the people, the glowing expressions of Rousseau and his successors,
all these new axioms, blaze up like burning coals, discharging clouds
of smoke and intoxicating vapor. High-sounding and vague language is
interposed between the mind and objects around it; all outlines are
confused and the vertigo begins. Never to the same extent have men lost
the purport of outward things. Never have they been at once more blind
and more chimerical. Never has their disturbed reason rendered them
more tranquil concerning real danger and created more alarm at imaginary
danger. Strangers with cool blood and who witness the spectacle, Mallet
du Pan, Dumont of Geneva, Arthur Young, Jefferson, Gouverneur Morris,
write that the French are insane. Morris, in this universal delirium,
can mention to Washington but one sane mind, that of Marmontel, and
Marmontel speaks in the same style as Morris. At the preliminary
meetings of the clubs, and at the assemblies of electors, he is the only
one who opposes unreasonable propositions. Surrounding him are none but
the excited, the exalted about nothing, even to grotesqueness[4354]. In
every act of the established regime, in every administrative measure,
"in all police regulations, in all financial decrees, in all the
graduated authorities on which public order and tranquility depend,
there was naught in which they did not find an aspect of tyranny. . .
On the walls and barriers of Paris being referred to, these were
denounced as enclosures for deer and derogatory to man."--

"I saw," says one of these orators, "at the barrier Saint-Victor,
sculptured on one of the pillars--would you believe it?----an enormous
lion's head, with open jaws vomiting forth chains as a menace to those
who passed it. Could a more horrible emblem of s