the present.  They knew nothing about the mechanic, the provincial bourgeois, or even the lesser nobility; these were seen only far away in the distance, half-effaced, and wholly transformed through philosophic theories and sentimental haze.  “Two or three thousand"[10] polished and cultivated individuals formed the circle of ladies and gentlemen, the so-called honest folks, and they never went outside of their own circle.  If they fleeting had a glimpse of the people from their chateaux and on their journeys, it was in passing, the same as of their post-horses, or of the cattle on their farms, showing compassion undoubtedly, but never divining their anxious thoughts and their obscure instincts.  The structure of the still primitive mind of the people was never imagined, the paucity and tenacity of their ideas, the narrowness of their mechanical, routine existence, devoted to manual labor, absorbed with the anxieties for daily bread, confined to the bounds of a visible horizon; their attachment to the local saint, to rites, to the priest, their deep-seated rancor, their inveterate distrust, their credulity growing out of the imagination, their inability to comprehend abstract rights, the law and public affairs, the hidden operation by which their brains would transform political novelties into nursery fables or into ghost stories, their contagious infatuations like those of sheep, their blind fury like that of bulls, and all those traits of character the Revolution was about to bring to light.  Twenty millions of men and more had scarcely passed out of the mental condition of the middle ages; hence, in its grand lines, the social edifice in which they could dwell had necessarily to be mediaeval.  It had to be cleaned up, windows put in and walls pulled down, but without disturbing the foundations, or the main building and its general arrangement; otherwise after demolishing it and living encamped for ten years in the open air like savages, its inmates would have been obliged to rebuild it on the same plan.  In uneducated minds, those having not yet attained to reflection, faith attaches itself only to the corporeal symbol, obedience being brought about only through physical restraint; religion is upheld by the priest and the State by the policeman. —­ One writer only, Montesquieu, the best instructed, the most sagacious, and the best balanced of all the spirits of the age, made these truths apparent, because he was at once an erudite, an observer, a historian and a jurisconsult.  He spoke, however, as an oracle, in maxims and riddles; and every time he touched matters belonging to his country and epoch he hopped about as if upon red hot coals.  That is why he remained respected but isolated, his fame exercising no influence.  The classic reason refused[11] to go so far as to make a careful study of both the ancient and the contemporary human being.  It found it easier and more convenient to follow its original bent, to shut its eyes on man