That
election was so contrived as to send a very large proportion of mere
country curates to the great and arduous work of new-modelling a state:
men who never had seen the state so much as in a picture; men who knew
nothing of the world beyond the bounds of an obscure village; who,
immersed in hopeless poverty, could regard all property, whether secular
or ecclesiastical, with no other eye than that of envy; among whom must
be many who, for the smallest hope of the meanest dividend in plunder,
would readily join in any attempts upon a body of wealth in which they
could hardly look to have any share, except in a general scramble.
Instead of balancing the power of the active chicaners in the other
assembly, these curates must necessarily become the active coadjutors,
or at best the passive instruments, of those by whom they had been
habitually guided in their petty village concerns. They, too, could
hardly be the most conscientious of their kind, who, presuming upon
their incompetent understanding, could intrigue for a trust which led
them from their natural relation to their flocks, and their natural
spheres of action, to undertake the regeneration of kingdoms. This
preponderating weight, being added to the force of the body of chicane
in the _Tiers Etat_, completed that momentum of ignorance, rashness,
presumption, and lust of plunder, which nothing has been able to resist.
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