to perfect their political education,[2208] to get of their theories, to learn, by contact with practical business, and in the study of details, the distance which separates speculation from practice; to discover that a new system of institutions works well only through a new system of habits, and that to decree a new system of habits is tantamount to attempting to build an old house.--Such, however, is the work they undertake. They reject the King's proposals, the limited reforms, the gradual transformations. According to them, it is their right and their duty to re-make society from top to bottom. Such is the command of pure reason, which has discovered the Rights of Man and the conditions of the Social Contract. II--Nature of societies, and the principle of enduring constitutions. Apply the Social Contract, if you like, but apply it only to those for whom it was drawn up. These were abstract beings, belonging neither to a period nor to a country, perfect creatures hatched out under the magic wand of a metaphysician. They had as a matter of fact come into existence by removing all the characteristics which distinguish one man from another,[2209] a Frenchman from a Papuan, a modern Englishman from a Briton in the time of Caesar, and by retaining only the part which is common to all.[2210] The essence thus obtained is a prodigiously meager one, an infinitely curtailed extract of human nature, that is, in the phraseology of the day, "A BEING WITH A DESIRE TO BE HAPPY AND THE FACULTY OF REASONING," nothing more and nothing else. After this pattern several million individuals, all precisely alike, have been prepared while, through a second simplification, as extraordinary as the first one, they are all supposed to be free and all equal, without a past, without kindred, without responsibility, without traditions, without customs, like so many mathematical units, all separable and all equivalent, and then it is imagined that, assembled together for the first time, these proceed to make their primitive bargain. From the nature they are supposed to possess and the situation in which they are placed, no difficulty is found in deducing their interests, their wills, and the contract between them. But if this contract suits them, it does not follow that it suits others. On the contrary, if follows that is does not suit others; the inconvenience becomes extreme on its being imposed on a living society; the measure of that inconvenience will be the immensity of the distance which divides a hollow abstraction, a philosophical phantom, an empty insubstantial image from the real and complete man.