disorder in a tranquil society. The most absolute and most concentrated government would not be strong enough to effect without disturbance a similar equalization of ranks, the same dismemberment of associations, and the same displacement of property. No social transformation can be peacefully accomplished without a well-commanded army, obedient and everywhere present, as was the case in the emancipation of the Russian serfs by Emperor Alexander. The new Constitution,[2342] on the contrary, reduces the King to the position of an honorary president, suspected and called in question by a disorganized State. Between him and the legislative body it interposes nothing but sources of conflict, and suppresses all means of concord. The monarch has no hold whatever on the administrative departments which he must direct; the mutual independence of the powers, from the center to the extremities of the State, everywhere produces indifference, negligence, and disobedience between the injunctions issued and their execution. France is a federation of forty thousand municipal sovereignties, in which the authority of legal magistrates varies according to the caprice of active citizens. These active citizens, too heavily loaded, shy away from the performance of public duty; in which a minority of fanatics and ambitious men monopolize the right to speak, to vote, all influence, the power and all action. They justify their multiple ursurpations, their unbridled despotism, and their increasing encroachments by the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The masterpiece[2343] of ideal abstractions and of practical absurdities is accomplished. In accordance with the Constitution spontaneous anarchy becomes legalized anarchy. The latter is perfect; nothing finer of the kind has been seen since the ninth century. ***** [Footnote 2301: The name for the dreaded secret Royal warrant of arrest. (SR.)] [Footnote 2302: The initiative rests with the King on one point: war cannot be decreed by the Assembly except on his formal and preliminary proposition. This exception was secured only after a violent struggle and a supreme effort by Mirabeau.] [Footnote 2303: Speech by Lanjuinais, November 7, 1789. "We determined on the separation of the powers. Why, then, should the proposal he made to us to unite the legislative power with the executive power in the persons of the ministers?"] [Footnote 2304: See the attendance of the Ministers before the Legislative Assembly.] [Footnote 2305: "Any society in which the separation of the powers is not clearly defined has no constitution." (Declaration of Rights, article XVI.)--This principle is borrowed from a text by Montesquieu, also from the American Constitution. In the rest the theory of Rousseau is followed.] [Footnote 2306: Mercure de France, an expression by Mallet du Pan.] [Footnote 2307: Constitution of 1791, ch. II. articles 5, 6, 7.--Decree of September 25--October 6, 1791, section III. articles, 8 to 25.]