is the Third Estate?" had arrested the attention of all serious minds. He
had several times, and in decisive circumstances, played an important part
in the Constituent Assembly. Since his vote of the 20th January, and until
the 9th Thermidor, he remained in voluntary obscurity; mingling since then
in all great theoretical discussions, he had exercised a preponderating
influence in recent events. From revolution to revolution, popular or
military, he came out in the part of legislator, his spirit escaping from
the influence of pure democracy. He had formerly proposed the banishment
_en masse_ of all the nobility, and he still nursed in the depths of his
soul a horror for all traditional superiority. He had said, "Whoever is
not of my species is not my fellow-creature; the nobles are not of my
species; they are wolves, and I fire upon them." He had, however, been
brought, by his reflections and the course of events, to construct
eccentric theories, of a factitious aristocracy, the wielders of power to
the exclusion of the nation, recruited from a limited circle--a disfigured
survival of the Italian republics of the middle ages, without the free and
salutary action of representative government.

"Confidence ought to proceed from below, and power to act from above,"
declared the appointed legislator of the 18th Brumaire. He himself
compared his political system to a pyramid, resting on the entire mass of
the nation, terminating at the top in a single man, whom he called the
Great Elector. He had not the courage to pronounce the word king.

Five millions of electors, constituted into primary assemblies, were to
prepare a _municipal_ list of 500,000 elected who in their turn were
entrusted with the formation of a _departmental_ list of 50,000 names. To
these twice sifted delegates was confided the care of electing 5000 as a
_national_ list, alone capable of becoming the agents of executive power
in the whole of France. The municipal and departmental administrations