Page:Lectures on the French Revolution of John Acton.djvu/117

Rh energy. The Assembly decided that a system of rights belonged to politics, and a system of duties to ethics, and rejected the motion, on the morning of the 4th of August, by 570 to 433.

This was the deciding division on the question of the Rights of Man. After some days, absorbed by the crisis of aristocracy, the distracted and wearied Assembly turned again from the excitement of facts and interests to the discussion of theory. A new committee of five was appointed to revise the work of the committee of eight, which dealt with the entire Constitution.

On August 17 Mirabeau reported their scheme. His heart was not in it; and he resented the intrusion of hampering generalities and moralities into the difficult experimental science of government. He advised that the Constitution should be settled first, that the guide should follow instead of preceding. The Assembly rejected the proposals of its committees, and all the plans which were submitted by the celebrities. The most remarkable of these was by Sieyes, and it met with favour; but the final vote was taken on a less illustrious composition, which bore no author's name. The selected text was less philosophical and profound, and it roused less distant echoes than its rival; but it was shorter, and more tame, and it was thought to involve fewer doubtful postulates, and fewer formidable consequences. Between the 20th and 26th of August it was still further abridged, and reduced from twenty-four propositions to the moderate dimension of seventeen. These omissions from a document which had been preferred to very remarkable competitors are the key to the intentions of the National Assembly, and our basis of interpretation.

The original scheme included a State Church. This was not adopted. It distinguished the inequality of men from the equality of rights. This was deemed self-evident and superfluous. It derived the mutual rights of men from their mutual duties; and this terrestrial definition also disappeared, leaving the way open to a higher cause. The adopted code was meagre and ill-composed, and