rioter, the committee dictator -- in short, the revolutionary and the
tyrant. In this political hothouse wild dreams and conceit will assume
monstrous proportions, and, in a few months, brains that are now only
ardent become hotheads.

Let us trace the effect of this excessive, unhealthy temperature
on imaginations and ambitions. The old tenement is down; the
foundations of the new one are not yet laid; society has to be made
over again from top to bottom. All willing men are asked to come and
help, and, as one plain principle suffices in drawing a plan, the
first comer may succeed. Henceforth political fancies swarm in the
district meetings, in the clubs, in the newspapers, in pamphlets, and
in every head-long, venturesome brain.

"There is not a merchant's clerk educated by reading the 'Nouvelle
Héloise,'[11] not a school teacher that has translated ten pages of
Livy, not an artist that has leafed through Rollin, not an aesthete
converted into journalists by committing to memory the riddles of the
'Contrat Social,' who does not draft a constitution. . . As nothing is
easier than to perfect a daydream, all perturbed minds gather, and
become excited, in this ideal realm. They start out with curiosity and
end up with enthusiasm. The man in the street rushes to the enterprise
in the same manner as a miser to a conjurer promising treasures, and,
thus childishly attracted, each hopes to find at once, what has never
been seen under even the most liberal governments: perpetual
perfection, universal brotherhood, the power of acquiring what one
lacks, and a life composed wholly of enjoyment."

One of these pleasures, and a keen one, is to daydream. One soars
in space. By means of eight or ten ready-made sentences, found in the