It is much more convenient to start with the rights of man and to deduce the consequences.  Schoolboy logic suffices for that to which collegiate rhetoric supplies the tirades. —­ In this great void of enlightenment the vague terms of liberty, equality and the sovereignty of the people, the glowing expressions of Rousseau and his successors, all these new axioms, blaze up like burning coals, discharging clouds of smoke and intoxicating vapor.  High-sounding and vague language is interposed between the mind and objects around it; all outlines are confused and the vertigo begins.  Never to the same extent have men lost the purport of outward things.  Never have they been at once more blind and more chimerical.  Never has their disturbed reason rendered them more tranquil concerning real danger and created more alarm at imaginary danger.  Strangers with cool blood and who witness the spectacle, Mallet du Pan, Dumont of Geneva, Arthur Young, Jefferson, Gouverneur Morris, write that the French are insane.  Morris, in this universal delirium, can mention to Washington but one sane mind, that of Marmontel, and Marmontel speaks in the same style as Morris.  At the preliminary meetings of the clubs, and at the assemblies of electors, he is the only one who opposes unreasonable propositions.  Surrounding him are none but the excited, the exalted about nothing, even to grotesqueness[54].  In every act of the established régime, in every administrative measure, “in all police regulations, in all financial decrees, in all the graduated authorities on which public order and tranquility depend, there was naught in which they did not find an aspect of tyranny. . . .  On the walls and barriers of Paris being referred to, these were denounced as enclosures for deer and derogatory to man.” —­

“I saw,” says one of these orators, “at the barrier Saint-Victor, sculptured on one of the pillars —­ would you believe it? — - an enormous lion’s head, with open jaws vomiting forth chains as a menace to those who passed it.  Could a more horrible emblem of slavery and of despotism be imagined!” —­ “The orator himself imitates the roar of the lion.  The listeners were all excited by it and I, who passed the barrier Saint-Victor so often, was surprised that this horrible image had not struck me.  That very day I examined it closely and, on the pilaster, I found only a small buckler suspended as an ornament by a little chain attached by the sculptor to a little lion’s mouth, like those we see serving as door-knockers or as water-cocks.” —­ Perverted sensations and delirious conceptions of this kind would be regarded by physicians as the symptoms of mental derangement, and we are only in the early months of the year 1789! —­ In such excitable and over-excited brains the powerful fascination of words is about to create phantoms, some of them hideous, the aristocrat and the tyrant, and others adorable, the friend of the people and the incorruptible patriot, so many disproportionate, imaginary figures, but which will replace actual living persons, and which the maniac is to overwhelm with his praise or pursue with his fury.