e their course.
Society, accordingly, disintegrated and a pell-mell, is turned into
a turbulent, shouting crowd, each pushing and being pushed, all alike
over-excited and congratulating each other on having finally obtained
elbow-room, and all demanding the new barriers shall be as fragile and
the new guardians as feeble, as defenseless, and as inert as possible.
This is what has been done. As a natural consequence, those who were
foremost in the rank have been relegated to the last; many have been
struck down in the fray, while in this permanent state of disorder,
which goes under the name of lasting order, elegant footwear continue
to be stamped upon by hobnailed boots and wooden shoes.--The fanatic and
the intemperate egoists can now let themselves go. They are no longer
subject to any ancient institutions, nor any armed might which can
restrain them. On the contrary, the new constitution, through its
theoretical declarations and the practical application of these, invites
them to let themselves go.--For, on the one hand, legally, it declares
to be based upon pure reason, beginning with a long string of abstract
dogmas from which its positive prescriptions are assumed to be
rigorously deduced. As a consequence all laws are submitted to the
shallow comments of reasoners and quibblers who will both interpret and
break them according to the principles.[1110]--On the other hand, as a
matter of fact, it hands over all government powers to the elections and
confers on the clubs the control of the authorities: which is to offer
a premium to the presumption of the ambitious who put themselves forward
because they think themselves capable, and who defame their rulers
purposely to displace them.--Every government department, organization
or administrative system is like a hothouse which serves to favor some
species of the human plant and wither others. This one is the best one
for the propagation and rapid increase of the coffee-house politician,
club haranguer, the stump-speaker, the street-rioter, the committee
dictator--in short, the revolutionary and the tyrant. In this political
hothouse wild dreams and conceit will assume monstrous proportions, and,
in a few months, brains that are now only ardent become hotheads.

Let us trace the effect of this excessive, unhealthy temperature on
imaginations and ambitions. The old tenement is down; the foundations of
the new one are not yet laid; society has to be made over again from