[82] Montalembert ("Disc. de Reception," 1852, Discours iii. pp. 614, 615, 621, 622) says of the Constituent Assembly of 1789--"It was the Assembly of 1789 which made the word revolution the synonyme of methodical destruction, of permanent war against all order and all authority.... It had that mania for uniformity which is the parody of unity, and which Montesquieu called the passion of mediocre minds.... In a word, the Constituent Assembly was wanting not only in justice, courage, and humanity, but it was also deficient in good sense. The evil which it created has survived it. It has made us believe that it is possible to destroy everything and to reconstruct everything in a day.... God has chastised it, above all, by the sterility of its work. It had had the pretence of laying the foundations of liberty for ever, and it had for its successors the most sanguinary tyrants who ever dishonoured any nation. Its mission was to re-establish the finances, the empire of the law, and it has bequeathed to France bankruptcy, anarchy, and despotism--despotism without even the repose which they have wrongly taken as the compensation of servitude. It has done more: it has left pretexts for every abuse of force, and precedents for any excess of future anarchy. [Montalembert could hardly have foreseen the last application of its principles which we have recently witnessed in Paris by the Commune, which, too, forsooth, was to have inaugurated a new era for humanity.] But it (this Constituent Assembly) founded nothing--Nothing! The ancient society which it reversed had lasted, in spite of its abuses, a thousand years." Can any one adduce a more typical representative of the clear, powerful, penetrating intellect of man than Voltaire! Voltaire, moreover, had the aim and ambition ("ecraser l'infame") to obliterate the tradition of the past; yet can there be a better example of the impotence of the intellect in the moral order? Does it not seem startling that, when the human intellect, as in the case of Voltaire, should be able to detect with so much acumen, so much wit, what is wrong, that it should be wholly struck with sterility when it attempts to tell us what is right, to reveal to man any truth in the moral order not traditionally known to them. And if the disciples of Voltaire have occasionally, in spasmodic efforts, attempted this, it has not been in the manner of Voltaire; it has been in the spirit of eclecticism, of reconstruction out of the elements of the past--that is to say (with pardon, if the phrase has been used before), an attempt to create, out of the elements he would have spurned, edifices which he would have derided.