the Executive was taken: that which restrained the Legislature was left.
Checks on the crown abounded; but should the crown be vacant, the powers
that remained would be without a check. The precautions were all in one
direction. Nobody would contemplate the contingency that there might be
no king. The constitution was inspired by a profound disbelief in Louis
XVI. and a pertinacious belief in monarchy. The assembly voted without
debate, by acclamation, a Civil List three times as large as that of
Queen Victoria. When Louis fled, and the throne was actually vacant,
they brought him back to it, preferring the phantom of a king who was a
prisoner to the reality of no king at all.

Next to this misapplication of American examples, which was the fault of
nearly all the leading statesmen, excepting Mounier, Mirabeau, and
Sieyes, the cause of the Revolution was injured by its religious policy.
The most novel and impressive lesson taught by the fathers of the
American Republic was that the people, and not the administration,
should govern. Men in office were salaried agents, by whom the nation
wrought its will. Authority submitted to public opinion, and left to it
not only the control, but the initiative of government. Patience in
waiting for a wind, alacrity in catching it, the dread of exerting
unnecessary influence, characterise the early presidents. Some of the
French politicians shared this view, though with less exaggeration than
Washington. They wished to decentralise the government, and to obtain,
for good or evil, the genuine expression of popular sentiment. Necker
himself, and Buzot, the most thoughtful of the Girondins, dreamed of
federalising France. In the United States there was no current of
opinion, and no combination of forces, to be seriously feared. The
government needed no security against being propelled in a wrong
direction. But the French Revolution was accomplished at the expense of
powerful classes. Besides the nobles, the Assembly, which had been made
supreme by the accession of the clergy, and had been led at first by
popular ecclesiastics, by Sieyes, Talleyrand, Cice, La Luzerne, made an
enemy of the clergy. The prerogative could not be destroyed without
touching the Church. Ecclesiastical patronage had helped to make the
crown absolute. To leave it in the hands of Louis and his ministers was
to renounce the entire policy of the constitution. To disestablish, was
to make it over to the Pope. It was c