essential to a deputy would most generally be found in the Third-Estate , the mind there being accustomed to business.” —­ In the way of theory:  the commoner is as well-informed as the noble, and he thinks he is still better informed, because, having read the same books and arrived at the same principles, he does not, like him, stop half-way on the road to their consequences, but plunges headlong to the very depths of the doctrine, convinced that his logic is clairvoyance and that he is more enlightened because he is the least prejudiced. —­ Consider the young men who, about twenty years of age in 1780, born in industrious families, accustomed to effort and able to work twelve hours a day, a Barnave, a Carnot, a Roederer, a Merlin de Thionville, a Robespierre, an energetic stock, feeling their strength, criticizing their rivals, aware of their weakness, comparing their own application and education to their levity and incompetence, and, at the moment when youthful ambition stirs within them, seeing themselves excluded in advance from any superior position, consigned for life to subaltern employment, and subjected in every career to the precedence of superiors who they hardly recognize as their equals.  At the artillery examinations where Chérin, the genealogist, refuses commoners, and where the Abbé Bosen, a mathematician, rejects the ignorant, it is discovered that capacity is wanting among the noble pupils and nobility among the capable pupils,[22] the two qualities of gentility and intelligence seeming to exclude each other, as there are but four or five out of a hundred pupils who combine the two conditions.  Now, as society at this time is mixed, such tests are frequent and easy.  Whether lawyer, physician, or man of letters, a member of the Third-Estate with whom a duke converses familiarly, who sits in a diligence alongside of a count-colonel of hussars,[23] can appreciate his companion or his interlocutor, weigh his ideas, test his merit and esteem him at his correct value, and I am sure that he does not overrate him. —­ Now that the nobles have lost their special capacities and the Third-Estate have acquired general competence, and as they are on the same level in education and competence, the inequality which separates them has become offensive because it has become useless.  Nobility being instituted by custom is no longer sanctified by conscience; the Third-Estate being justly excited against privileges that have no justification, whether in the capacity of the noble or in the incapacity of the bourgeois.

   IV.  Rousseau’s philosophy spreads and takes hold.

Philosophy in the minds thus fitted for it. — That of Rousseau prominent. — This philosophy in harmony with new necessities. — It is adopted by the Third-Estate .