‘In all things the majority of numbers is to give the law’: such was the keynote of the whole controversy. Nobody dreamed that the concession of political rights could be determined by any other element than that of number. ‘What can be more absurd,’ exclaims a writer who was one of the most moderate of the time, ‘than that a body which has twenty millions of heads should be represented in the same manner as one which has an hundred thousand?’[126] After having shown that there were in France eighty thousand ecclesiastics and about a hundred and twenty thousand nobles, Siéyès merely adds, ‘Compare this number of these two hundred thousand privileged persons to that of twenty-six million souls, and judge the question.’[127] The most timid among the innovators of the Revolution, those who wished that the reasonable prerogatives of the different Orders should be respected, talked, nevertheless, as if there were neither class nor Order, and still took the numerical majority[128] as the sole basis of their calculations. Everybody framed his own statistics, but all was statistical. ‘The relation of privileged persons to those not privileged,’ said Lafon-Ladebat, ‘is as one to twenty-two.’[129] According to the city of Bourg,[130] the commons formed nineteen-twentieths of the population; according to the city of Nîmes,[131] twenty-nine thirtieths. It was, as you see, a mere question of figures. From this political arithmetic, Volney deduced, as a natural consequence, universal suffrage;[132] Roederer, universal eligibility;[133] Péthion, the unity of the assembly.[134] Many of these writers, in drawing out their figures, knew nothing of the quotient: and the calculation frequently led them beyond their hopes, and even beyond their wishes. The most striking thing, at this passionate epoch, was not so much the passions which broke forth, as the power of the opinions that prevailed; and the opinion that prevailed above all others was, that not only there were no privileges, but even that there were no private rights. Even those who professed the largest consideration for privileges and private rights considered such privileges and rights as wholly indefensible--not only those exercised in their own time, but those existing at any time and in any country. The conception of a temperate and ponderated Government, that is to say, of a Government in which the different classes of society, and the different interests which divide them, balance each other--in which men are weighed not only as individuals, but by reason of their property, their patronage, and their influence in the scale of the common weal,--these conceptions were wanting in the mind of the multitude; they were replaced by the notion of a crowd, consisting of similar elements, and they were superseded by votes, not as the representatives of interests or of persons, but of numerical force.[135]