As a beginning, the Constitution, so long anticipated and so often promised, is hastily fabricated:[1104] declarations of rights in thirty-five articles, the Constitutional bill in one hundred and twenty-four articles, political principles and institutions of every sort, electoral, legislative, executive, administrative, judicial, financial and military;[1105] in three weeks all is drawn up and passed on the double.--Of course, the new Constitutionalists do not propose to produce an effective and serviceable instrument; that is the least of their worries. Hérault Séchelles, the reporter of the bill, writes on the 7th of June, "to have procured for him at once the laws of Minos, of which he has urgent need;" very urgent need, as he must hand in the Constitution that week.[1106] Such circumstance is sufficiently characteristic of both the workmen and the work. All is mere show and pretense. Some of the workmen are shrewd politicians whose sole object is to furnish the public with words instead of realities; others, ordinary scribblers of abstractions, or even ignoramuses, and unable to distinguish words from reality, imagine that they are framing laws by stringing together a lot of phrases.--It is not a difficult job; the phrases are ready-made to hand. "Let the plotters of anti-popular systems," says the reporter, "painfully elaborate their projects! Frenchmen.... have only to consult their hearts to read the Republic there!"[1107] Drafted in accordance with the "Contrat-Social," filled with Greek and Latin reminiscences, it is a summary "in pithy style" of the manual of current aphorisms then in vogue, Rousseau's mathematical formulas and prescriptions, "the axioms of truth and the consequences flowing from these axioms," in short, a rectilinear constitution which any school-boy may spout on leaving college. Like a handbill posted on the door of a new shop, it promises to customers every imaginable article that is handsome and desirable. Would you have rights and liberties? You will find them all here. Never has the statement been so clearly made, that the government is the servant, creature and tool of the governed; it is instituted solely "to guarantee to them their natural, imprescriptible rights." [1108] Never has a mandate been more strictly limited: "The right of expressing one's thoughts and opinions, either through the press or in any other way; the right of peaceful assembly, the free exercise of worship, cannot be interdicted." Never have citizens been more carefully guarded against the encroachments and excesses of public authority: "The law should protect public and private liberties against the oppression of those who govern... offenses committed by the people's mandatories and agents must never go unpunished. Let free men instantly put to death every individual usurping sovereignty. .. Every act against a man outside of the cases and forms which the law determines is arbitrary and tyrannical;