II. As soon as the conviction that the general welfare demands a change in our condition has made itself generally felt, law, the State, and property will disappear spontaneously and give way to the new condition. "Reform, under this meaning of the term, can scarcely be considered as of the nature of action. [It is a general enlightenment.] Men feel their situation; and the restraints that shackled them before, vanish like a deception. When such a crisis has arrived, not a sword will need to be drawn, not a finger to be lifted up in purposes of violence. The adversaries will be too few and too feeble, to be able to entertain a serious thought of resistance against the universal sense of mankind."[113] In what way may the change of our conditions take place? 1. "The opinion most popular in France at the time that the national convention entered upon its functions, was that the business of the convention extended only to the presenting a draft of a constitution, to be submitted in the sequel to the approbation of the districts, and then only to be considered as law."[114] "The first idea that suggests itself respecting this opinion is, that, if constitutional laws ought to be subjected to the revision of the districts, then all laws ought to undergo the same process. [But if the approbation of the districts to any declarations is not to be delusive, the discussion of these declarations in the districts must be unlimited. Then] a transaction will be begun to which it is not easy to foresee a termination. Some districts will object to certain articles; and, if these articles be modeled to obtain their approbation, it is possible that the very alteration introduced to please one part of the community may render the code less acceptable to another."[115] "This principle of a consent of districts has an immediate tendency, by a salutary gradation perhaps, to lead to the dissolution of all government."[116] It is indeed "desirable that the most important acts of the national representatives should be subject to the approbation or rejection of the districts whose representatives they are, for exactly the same reason as it is desirable that the acts of the districts themselves should, as speedily as practicability will admit, be in force only so far as relates to the individuals by whom those acts are approved."[117] 2. This system would have the effect, first, that the constitution would be very short. The impracticability of obtaining the free approbation of a great number of districts to an extensive code would speedily manifest itself; and the whole constitution might consist of a scheme for the division of the country into parts equal in their population, and the fixing of stated periods for the election of a national assembly, not to say that the latter of these articles may very probably be dispensed with.[118]