ions. The actual Assembly is but little more than a council of
lawyers, got together from every town and village in France."

In actual fact, out of 745 deputies, indeed, "400 lawyers belong, for
the most part, to the dregs of the profession"; there are about twenty
constitutional priests, "as many poets and literary men of but little
reputation, almost all without any fortune," the greater number being
less than thirty years old, sixty being less than twenty-six,[2202]
nearly all of them trained in the clubs and the popular assemblies".
There is not one noble or prelate belonging to the ancient regime,
no great landed proprietor,[2203] no head of a service, no eminent
specialist in diplomacy, in finance, in the administrative or military
arts. But three general officers are found there, and these are of the
lower rank,[2204] one of them having held his appointment but three
months, and the other two being wholly unknown.--At the head of the
diplomatic committee stands Brissot, itinerant journalist, lately
traveling about in England and the United States. He is supposed to be
competent in the affairs of both worlds; in reality he is one of those
presuming, threadbare, talkative fellows, who, living in a garret,
lecture foreign cabinets and reconstruct all Europe. Things, to them,
seem to be as easily worked out as words and sentences: one day,[2205]
to entice the English into an alliance with France, Brissot proposes to
place two towns, Dunkirk and Calais, in their hands as security; another
day, he proposes "to make a descent on Spain, and, at the same time, to
send a fleet to conquer Mexico."--The leading member on the committee on
finances is Cambon, a merchant from Montpellier, a good accountant,
who, at a later period, is to simplify accounting and regulate the Grand
Livre of the public debt, which means public bankruptcy. Mean-while,
he hastens this on with all his might by encouraging the Assembly to
undertake the ruinous and terrible war that is to last for twenty-three
years; according to him, "there is more money than is needed for
it."[2206] In actual fact, the guarantee of assignats is used up and the
taxes do not come in. They live only on the paper money they issue. The
assignats lose forty per centum, and the ascertained deficit for 1792
is four hundred millions.[2207] But this revolutionary financier relies
upon the confiscations which he instigates in France, and which are
to be set agoing in Belgium; he