great impulse to a nation, caused a great deal of good, and a great deal
of harm. It impeded legal authority, when this of itself was sufficient;
but it also gave an immense energy to the revolution, when, attacked on
all sides, it could only save itself by the most violent efforts. For the
rest, the founders of this association had not calculated all its
consequences. They regarded it simply as a wheel destined to keep or put
in movement the public machine, without danger, when it tended to abate or
to cease its activity; they did not think they were working for the
advantage of the multitude. After the flight of Varennes, this party had
become too exacting and too formidable; they forsook it, and supported
themselves against it with the mass of the assembly and the middle class,
whose direction was left vacant by the death of Mirabeau. At this period,
it was important to them speedily to fix the constitutional revolution;
for to protract it would have been to bring on the republican revolution.

The mass of the assembly, we have just mentioned, abounded in just,
experienced, and even superior minds. Its leaders were two men, strangers
to the third estate, and adopted by it. Without the abbe Sieyes, the
constituent assembly would probably have had less unity in its operation,
and without Mirabeau, less energy in its conduct.

Sieyes was one of those men who create sects in an age of enthusiasm, and
who exercise the ascendancy of a powerful reason in an enlightened era.
Solitude and philosophical studies had matured him at an early age. His
views were new, strong, and extensive, but somewhat too systematic.
Society had especially been the subject of his examination; he had watched
its progress, investigated its springs. The nature of government appeared
to him less a question of right than a question of epoch. His vast
intellect ranged the society of our days in its divisions, relations,
powers, and movement. Sieyes, though of cold temperament, had the ardour