That
election was so contrived as to send a very large proportion of mere
country curates to the great and arduous work of new-modeling 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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