nature of property, and ought therefore to have been most delicately handled. They are called the Constituent Assembly. Never was a name less appropriate. They were not constituent, but the very reverse of constituent. They constituted nothing that stood or that deserved to last. They had not, and they could not possibly have, the information or the habits of mind which are necessary {48}for the framing of that most exquisite of all machines--a government. The metaphysical cant with which they prefaced their constitution has long been the scoff of all parties. Their constitution itself,--that constitution which they described as absolutely perfect, and to which they predicted immortality,--disappeared in a few months, and left no trace behind it. They were great only in the work of destruction. The glory of the National Assembly is this, that they were in truth, what Mr. Burke called them in austere irony, the ablest architects of ruin that ever the world saw. They were utterly incompetent to perform any work which required a discriminating eye and a skilful hand. But the work which was then to be done was a work of devastation. They had to deal with abuses so horrible and so deeply rooted that the highest political wisdom could scarcely have produced greater good to mankind than was produced by their fierce and senseless temerity. Demolition is undoubtedly a vulgar task; the highest glory of the statesman is to construct. But there is a time for every thing,--a time to set up, and a time to pull down. The talents of revolutionary leaders and those of the legislator have equally their use and their season. It is the natural, the almost universal, law, that the age of insurrections, and proscriptions shall precede the age of good government, of temperate liberty, and liberal order.