ecision. After ten days of leisurely
reflection, but without real hesitation, for everything had been
arranged with Lameth and Barnave, the leaders of the majority, Lewis
gave his sanction to the Constitution of 1791, which was to last until
1792, and the National Assembly was dissolved. Political delinquents,
including the accomplices of Varennes, received an amnesty.

By right of the immense change they made in the world, by their energy
and sincerity, their fidelity to reason and their resistance to
custom, their superiority to the sordid craving for increase of
national power, their idealism and their ambition to declare the
eternal law, the States-General of 1789 are the most memorable of all
political assemblies. They cleared away the history of France, and
with 2500 decrees they laid down the plan of a new world for men who
were reared in the old. Their institutions perished, but their
influence has endured; and the problem of their history is to explain
why so genuine a striving for the highest of earthly goods so
deplorably failed. The errors that ruined their enterprise may be
reduced to one. Having put the nation in the place of the Crown, they
invested it with the same unlicensed power, raising no security and no
remedy against oppression from below, assuming, or believing, that a
government truly representing the people could do no wrong. They acted
as if authority, duly constituted, requires no check, and as if no
barriers are needed against the nation. The notion common among them,
that liberty consists in a good civil code, a notion shared by so
famous a Liberal as Madame de Stael, explains the facility with which
so many revolutionists went over to the Empire. But the dreadful
convulsion that ensued had a cause for which they were not
responsible. In the violent contradiction between the new order of
things in France and the inorganic world around it, conflict was
irrepressible. Between French principles and European practice there
could be neither conciliation nor confidence. Each was a constant
menace to the other, and the explosion of enmity could only be
restrained by unusual wisdom and policy.

The dissolution of the Whig party in England indicates what might be
expected in the continental monarchies where there were no Whigs. We
shall presently see that it was upon this rock, in the nature of
things, that the Revolution went to pieces. The wisest of the
statesmen who saw the evil days, Royer Col