Duport, who was strong-minded, and who had acquired premature experience of the management of political passions, in the struggles which parliament had sustained against the ministry, and which he had chiefly directed, knew well that a people reposes the moment it has gained its rights, and that it begins to grow weak as soon as it reposes. To keep in vigour those who governed in the assembly, in the mayoralty, in the militia; to prevent public activity from slackening, and not to disband the people, whose aid he might one day require, he conceived and executed the famous confederation of the clubs. This institution, like everything that gives a 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 abbé Sieyès, the constituent assembly would probably have had less unity in its operation, and without Mirabeau, less energy in its conduct.