And, Mounier also gives a similar sketch. ‘We have not a fixed or complete form of government—we have not a constitution, because all the powers are confounded—because no boundary is traced out.—The judicial power is not even separated from the legislative.—Authority is dispersed; it’s various parts are always in opposition; and amidst their perpetual shocks the rights of the lower class of citizens are betrayed.—The laws are openly despised, or rather we are not agreed what ought to be called laws.’ Footnote 20: In the Bastille, it is true, were found but seven prisoners.—Yet, it ought to be remarked, that three of them had lost their reason—that, when the secrets of the prison-house were laid open, men started with horrour from the inspection of instruments of torture, that appeared to be almost worn out by the exercise of tyranny—and that citizens were afraid even for a moment to enter the noisome dungeons, in which their fellow creatures had been confined for years. Footnote 21: The cruelties of the half civilized romans, combined with their unnatural vices, even when literature and the arts were most cultivated, prove, that humanity is the offspring of the understanding, and that the progress of the sciences alone can make men wiser and happier. Footnote 22: Mirabeau appears to have been continually hurt by the want of dignity in the assembly.—By the inconsistency, which made them stalk as heroes one moment, with a true theatrical stride, and the next cringe with the flexible backs of habitual slaves. Footnote 23: ‘Let us compare,’ he further adds, ‘the number of innocents sacrificed by mistake, by the sanguinary maxims of the courts of criminal judicature, and the ministerial vengeance exercised secretly in the dungeons of Vincennes, and in the cells of the Bastille, with the sudden and impetuous vengeance of the multitude, and then decide on which side barbarity appears. At the moment when the hell created by tyranny for the torment of it’s victims opens itself to the public eye; at the moment when all the citizens have been permitted to descend into those gloomy caves, to poize the chains of their friends, of their defenders; at the moment when the registers of those iniquitous archives are fallen into all hands; it is necessary, that the people should be essentially good, or this manifestation of the atrocities of ministers would have rendered them as cruel as themselves!’ Footnote 24: These members seem to have formed a just estimate of the french character. Footnote 25: Some french wags have laid a great stress on these decrees passing after dinner. Footnote 26: