On examining with attention the Instructions drawn up by the three Orders before their convocation in 1789--by all the three, the nobility and clergy, as well as the _Tiers-État_--noting _seriatim_ all the demands made for the changes of laws or customs, it will be seen with a sort of terror, on terminating this immense labour, and casting up the sum total of all these particular requirements, that what was required is no less than the simultaneous and systematic abolition of every law and every usage current throughout the country; and that what was impending must be one of the most extensive and dangerous revolutions that ever appeared in the world. Yet the very men who were so shortly to become its victims knew nothing of it. They fancied that the total and sudden transformation of so ancient and complicated a state of society was to be effected, without any concussion, by the aid and efficacy of reason alone; and they fatally forgot that maxim which their forefathers, four hundred years before, had expressed in the simple and energetic language of their time: ‘_Par requierre de trop grande franchise et libertés chet-on en trop grande servaige._’ (By requiring too great liberty and franchise, men fall into too great servitude.) It was not surprising that the nobility and middle classes, so long excluded from all public action, should have displayed this strange inexperience; but what astonishes far more is, that the very men who had the conduct of public affairs, the ministers, the magistrates, and the Intendants, should not have evinced more foresight. Many of them, nevertheless, were very clever men in their profession, and were thoroughly possessed of all the details of the public administration of their time; but in that great science of government, which teaches the comprehension of the general movement of society, the appreciation of what is passing in the minds of the masses, and the foreknowledge of the probable results--they were just as much novices as the people itself. In truth, it is only the exercise of free institutions that can teach the statesman this principal portion of his art.