Moreover, they have their own political bent, for nearly all of them are upstarts of the new régime. We find in their ranks 264 department administrators, 109 district administrators, 125 justices and prosecuting-attorneys, 68 mayors and town officers, besides about twenty officers of the National Guard, constitutional bishops and curés. The whole amounting to 566 of the elected functionaries, who, for the past twenty months, have carried on the government under the direction of their electors. We have seen how this was done and under what conditions, with what compliances and with what complicity, with what deference to clamorous opinion, with what docility in the presence of rioters, with what submission to the orders of the mob, with what a deluge of sentimental phrases and commonplace abstractions. Sent to Paris as deputies, through the choice or toleration of the clubs, they bear along with them their politics and their rhetoric. The result is an assemblage of narrow, perverted, hasty, inflated and feeble minds; at each daily session, twenty word-mills turn to no purpose, the greatest of public powers at once becoming a manufactory of nonsense, a school of extravagancies, and a theatre for declamation. II.--Degree and quality of their intelligence and Culture. Is it possible that serious men could have listened to such weird nonsense until the bitter end? "I am a tiller of the soil,"[2210] says one deputy, "I now dare speak of the antique nobility of my plow. A yoke of oxen once constituted the pure, incorruptible legal worthies before whom my good ancestors executed their contracts, the authenticity of which, far better recorded on the soil than on flimsy parchment, is protected from any species of revolution whatever." Is it conceivable that the reporter of a law, that is about to exile or imprison forty thousand priests, should employ in an argument such silly bombast as the following?[2211] "I have seen in the rural districts the hymeneal torch diffusing only pale and somber rays, or, transformed into the flambeaux of furies, the hideous skeleton of superstition seated even on the nuptial couch, placed between nature and the wedded, and arresting, etc.... Oh Rome, art thou satisfied? Art thou then like Saturn, to whom fresh holocausts were daily imperative?... Depart, ye creators of discord! The soil of liberty is weary of bearing you. Would ye breathe the atmosphere of the Aventine mount? The national ship is already prepared for you. I hear on the shore the impatient cries of the crew; I see the breezes of liberty swelling its sails. Like Telemachus, ye will go forth on the waters to seek your father; but never will you have to dread the Sicilian rocks, nor the seductions of a Eucharis."