The things we do!

From the beginning of the year 1790 the
returns of the votes taken show that as many are absent as present;
at Besan?on there are only nine hundred and fifty-nine voters out of
thirty-two hundred inscribed; four months after this more than one-
half of the electors fail to come to the polls;[31] and throughout
France, even at Paris, the indifference to voting keeps on
increasing. Puppets of such an administration as that of Louis XV.
and Louis XVI. do not become Florentine or Athenian citizens in a
single night. The hearts and heads of three or four millions of men
are not suddenly endowed with faculties and habits which render them
capable of diverting one-third of their energies to work which is
new, disproportionate, gratuitous, and supererogatory. - A fallacy
of monstrous duplicity lies at the basis of the political theories
of the day and of those which were invented during the following ten
years. Arbitrarily, and without any examination, a certain weight
and resistance are attributed to the human metal employed.


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