the constructing,
launching, and steering of a polity was lamentably wanting; for it is a
kind of skill to which practice contributes more than books. Books are
indeed useful to the politician, as they are useful to the navigator and
to the surgeon. But the real navigator is formed on the waves; the real
surgeon is formed at bedsides; and the conflicts of free states are the
real school of constitutional statesmen. The National Assembly had,
however, now served an apprenticeship of two laborious and eventful
years. It had, indeed, by no means finished its education; but it was no
longer, as on the day when it met, altogether rude to political
functions. Its later proceedings contain abundant proof that the members
had profited by their experience. Beyond all doubt, there was not in
France any equal number of persons possessing in an equal degree the
qualities necessary for the judicious direction of public affairs; and,
just at this moment, these legislators, misled by a childish wish to
display their own disinterestedness, deserted the duties which they had
half learned, and which nobody else had learned at all, and left their
hall to a second crowd of novices, who had still to master the first
rudiments of political business. When Barere wrote his Memoirs, the
absurdity of this self-denying ordinance had been proved by events, and
was, we believe, acknowledged by all parties. He accordingly, with his
usual mendacity, speaks of it in terms implying that he had opposed it.
There was, he tells us, no good citizen who did not regret this fatal
vote. Nay, all wise men, he says, wished the National Assembly to
continue its sittings as the first Legislative Assembly. But no
attention was paid to the wishes of the enlightened friends of liberty;
and the generous but fatal suicide was perpetrated. Now the fact is that
Barere, far from opposing this ill-advised measure, was one of those who
most eagerly supported it; that he described it from the tribune as wise
and magnanimous; that he assigned, as his reasons for taking this view,
some of those phrases in which orators of his class delight, and which,
on all men who have the smallest insight into politics, produce an
effect very similar to that of ipecacuanha. "Those," he said, "who have
framed a constitution for their country are, so to speak, out of the
pale of that social state of which they are the authors; for creative
power is not in the same sphere with that which it has