The Constituent Assembly, in spite of all with which it can be reproached, remains nevertheless the most illustrious popular assemblage that has ever appeared among the nations of the world, both because of the magnitude of its transactions' and the immensity of their results. There is no political question, however lofty, which it did not discuss and suitably solve. What would it not have been, had it kept to the _cahiers_[362] of the States-General and not endeavoured to go beyond them! All that human experience and intelligence had conceived, discovered and elaborated during three centuries is to be found in these instructions. The various abuses of the old monarchy are there pointed out and remedies proposed; every kind of liberty is claimed, even the liberty of the press; every form of improvement demanded for industries, manufactures, commerce, public roads, the army, taxation, finance, the schools, public education, and the rest. We have passed across abysses of crime and accumulations of glory to no profit; the Republic and the Empire have served no purpose: the Empire merely regulated the brute force of the arms which the Republic had set in motion; it has left us centralization, a vigorous form of administration which I consider an evil, but which alone, perhaps, was able to replace the local systems of administration at a time when these were destroyed, and when anarchy combined with ignorance filled all men's heads. With that exception, we have not moved a step forward since the Constituent Assembly: its labours are like those of the great physician of antiquity, which at the same time extended and settled the boundaries of science. Let us speak of some of the members of this Assembly, and in particular of Mirabeau, in whom they are all summed up, by whom they are all governed. * Connected, thanks to the disorders and the chances of his life, with the greatest events and with the lives of malefactors, ravishers, and adventurers, Mirabeau, the tribune of the aristocracy, the deputy of the democracy, had in his composition something of Gracchus and Don Juan, of Catiline and Guzman de Alfarache, of the Cardinal de Richelieu and the Cardinal de Retz, of the _roué_ of the Regency and the savage of the Revolution: moreover he had something of the Mirabeaus, the exiled Florentine family, which retained a trace of those armed palaces and of those great factionists celebrated by Dante; the naturalized French family, in which the republican spirit of the Italian middle-ages and the feudal spirit of our own middle-ages were united in a succession of uncommon men.