rty,
Equality, Fraternity: not vestures but the wish for vestures! The Nation
is for the present, figuratively speaking, naked! It has no rule or
vesture; but is naked,--a Sansculottic Nation.

So far, therefore, in such manner have our Patriot Brissots, Guadets
triumphed. Vergniaud's Ezekiel-visions of the fall of thrones and
crowns, which he spake hypothetically and prophetically in the Spring of
the year, have suddenly come to fulfilment in the Autumn. Our eloquent
Patriots of the Legislative, like strong Conjurors, by the word of their
mouth, have swept Royalism with its old modes and formulas to the winds;
and shall now govern a France free of formulas. Free of formulas! And
yet man lives not except with formulas; with customs, ways of doing and
living: no text truer than this; which will hold true from the Tea-table
and Tailor's shopboard up to the High Senate-houses, Solemn Temples; nay
through all provinces of Mind and Imagination, onwards to the outmost
confines of articulate Being,--Ubi homines sunt modi sunt! There are
modes wherever there are men. It is the deepest law of man's nature;
whereby man is a craftsman and 'tool-using animal;' not the slave of
Impulse, Chance, and Brute Nature, but in some measure their lord.
Twenty-five millions of men, suddenly stript bare of their modi, and
dancing them down in that manner, are a terrible thing to govern!

Eloquent Patriots of the Legislative, meanwhile, have precisely this
problem to solve. Under the name and nickname of 'statesmen, hommes
d'etat,' of 'moderate-men, moderantins,' of Brissotins, Rolandins,
finally of Girondins, they shall become world-famous in solving it. For
the Twenty-five millions are Gallic effervescent too;--filled both with
hope of the unutterable, of universal Fraternity and Golden Age; and
with terror of the unutterable, Cimmerian Europe all rallying on us. It
is a problem like few. Truly, if man, as the Philosophers brag, did to
any extent look before and after, what, one may ask, in many cases would
become of him? What, in this case, would become of these Seven Hundred
and Forty-nine men? The Convention, seeing clearly before and after,
were a paralysed Convention. Seeing clearly to the length of its own
nose, it is not paralysed.

To the Convention itself neither the work nor the method of doing it is
doubtful: To make the Constitution; to defend the Republic till that be
made. Speedily enough, accordingly, there has been a 'Commit