ly over on that side to which it leans, and such is its
incurable infirmity.

Consider, indeed, the authentic monuments of Jacobin thought, the
"Journal des Amis de la Constitution," the gazettes of Loustalot,
Desmoulins, Brissot, Condorcet, Freron and Marat, Robespierre's, and St.
Just's pamphlets and speeches, the debates in the Legislative Assembly
and in the Convention, the harangues, addresses and reports of the
Girondins and Montagnards, in brief, the forty volumes of extracts
compiled by Buchez and Roux. Never has so much been said to so little
purpose; all the truth that is uttered is drowned in the monotony and
inflation of empty verbiage and vociferous bombast. One experience in
this direction is sufficient.[1117] The historian who resorts this mass
of rubbish for accurate information finds none of any account; in vain
will he read kilometers of it: hardly will he there meet one fact, one
instructive detail, one document which brings before his eyes a distinct
personality, which shows him the real sentiments of a villager or of a
gentleman, which vividly portrays the interior of a hotel-de-ville, of
a soldier's barracks, of a municipal chamber, or the character of an
insurrection. To define fifteen or twenty types and situations which sum
up the history of the period, we have been and shall be obliged to
seek them elsewhere--in the correspondence of local administrators,
in affidavits on criminal records, in confidential reports of the
police,[1118] and in the narratives of foreigners,[1119] who, prepared
for it by a different education, look behind words for things, and see
France beyond the "Contrat Social." This teeming France, this grand
tragedy which twenty-six millions of players are performing on a stage
of 26 000 square leagues, is lost to the Jacobin. His literature, as
well as his brain, contain only insubstantial generalizations like those
above cited, rolling out in a mere play of ideas, sometimes in concise
terms when the writer happens to be a professional reasoner like
Condorcet, but most frequently in a tangled, knotty style full of loose
and disconnected meshes when the spokesman happens to be an improvised
politician or a philosophic tyro like the ordinary deputies of the
Assembly and the speakers of the clubs. It is a pedantic scholasticism
set forth with fanatical rant. Its entire vocabulary consists of about
a hundred words, while all ideas are reduced to one, that of man in
himself: human