is displayed? Your mob can do this as well at
least as your assemblies. The shallowest understanding, the rudest hand,
is more than equal to that task. Rage and frenzy will pull down more in
half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in
a hundred years. The errors and defects of old establishments are
visible and palpable. It calls for little ability to point them out; and
where absolute power is given, it requires but a word wholly to abolish
the vice and the establishment together. The same lazy, but restless
disposition, which loves sloth and hates quiet, directs these
politicians, when they come to work for supplying the place of what they
have destroyed. To make everything the reverse of what they have seen is
quite as easy as to destroy. No difficulties occur in what has never
been tried. Criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of
what has not existed; and eager enthusiasm and cheating hope have all
the wide field of imagination, in which they may expatiate with little
or no opposition.

At once to preserve and to reform is quite another thing. When the
useful parts of an old establishment are kept, and what is superadded is
to be fitted to what is retained, a vigorous mind, steady, persevering
attention, various powers of comparison and combination, and the
resources of an understanding fruitful in expedients are to be
exercised; they are to be exercised in a continued conflict with the
combined force of opposite vices, with the obstinacy that rejects all
improvement, and the levity that is fatigued and disgusted with
everything of which it is in possession. But you may object,--"A process
of this kind is slow. It is not fit for an Assembly which glories in
performing in a few months the work of ages. Such a mode of reforming,
possibly, might take up many years." Without question it might; and it
ought. It is one of the excellences of a method in which time is amongst
the assistants, that its operation is slow, and in some cases almost
imperceptible. If circumspection and caution are a part of wisdom, when
we work only upon inanimate matter, surely they become a part of duty
too, when the subject of our demolition and construction is not brick
and timber, but sentient beings, by the sudden alteration of whose
state, condition, and habits, multitudes may be rendered miserable. But
it seems as if it were the prevalent opinion in Paris, that an unfeeling
heart and an undoubt