k, as it
can and may. O Sieyes, and ye other Committeemen, and Twelve Hundred
miscellaneous individuals from all parts of France! What is the Belief
of France, and yours, if ye knew it? Properly that there shall be no
Belief; that all formulas be swallowed. The Constitution which will suit
that? Alas, too clearly, a No-Constitution, an Anarchy;--which also, in
due season, shall be vouchsafed you.

But, after all, what can an unfortunate National Assembly do? Consider
only this, that there are Twelve Hundred miscellaneous individuals;
not a unit of whom but has his own thinking-apparatus, his own
speaking-apparatus! In every unit of them is some belief and wish,
different for each, both that France should be regenerated, and also
that he individually should do it. Twelve Hundred separate Forces, yoked
miscellaneously to any object, miscellaneously to all sides of it; and
bid pull for life!

Or is it the nature of National Assemblies generally to do, with endless
labour and clangour, Nothing? Are Representative Governments mostly
at bottom Tyrannies too! Shall we say, the Tyrants, the ambitious
contentious Persons, from all corners of the country do, in this manner,
get gathered into one place; and there, with motion and counter-motion,
with jargon and hubbub, cancel one another, like the fabulous Kilkenny
Cats; and produce, for net-result, zero;--the country meanwhile
governing or guiding itself, by such wisdom, recognised or for most part
unrecognised, as may exist in individual heads here and there?--Nay,
even that were a great improvement: for, of old, with their Guelf
Factions and Ghibelline Factions, with their Red Roses and White Roses,
they were wont to cancel the whole country as well. Besides they do it
now in a much narrower cockpit; within the four walls of their Assembly
House, and here and there an outpost of Hustings and Barrel-heads; do it
with tongues too, not with swords:--all which improvements, in the art
of producing zero, are they not great? Nay, best of all, some happy
Continents (as the Western one, with its Savannahs, where whosoever has
four willing limbs finds food under his feet, and an infinite sky over
his head) can do without governing.--What Sphinx-questions; which the
distracted world, in these very generations, must answer or die!

Chapter 1.6.II.

The Constituent Assembly.

One thing an elected Assembly of Twelve Hundred is fit for: Destroying.
Which indeed is but a more decide