"we should fall back on the humiliating distinctions" of the ancient regime; "we should revivify the germ of an aristocracy which must be exterminated."....
"Moreover, whatever recalls or revives feudal Institutions is bad, and an Upper Chamber is one of its remnants." ...."If the English have one, it is because they have been forced to make a compromise with prejudice." The National Assembly, sovereign and philosophic, soars above their errors, their trammel; and their example.

The depository of truth, it has not to receive lessons from others, but to give them, and to offer to the world's admiration the first type of a Constitution which is perfect and in conformity with principle, the most effective of any in preventing the formation of a governing class; in closing the way to public business, not only to the old noblesse, but to the aristocracy of the future; in continuing and exaggerating the work of absolute monarchy; in preparing for a community of officials and administrators; in lowering the level of humanity; in reducing to sloth and brutalizing or blighting the elite of the families which maintain or raise themselves; and in withering the most precious of nurseries, that in which the State recruits its statesmen.[2217] Excluded from the Government, the aristocracy is about to retire into private life.

Let us follow them to their estates: Feudal rights instituted for a barbarous State are certainly a great draw-back in a modern State.

If appropriate in an epoch when property and sovereignty were fused together, when the Government was local, when life was militant, they form an incongruity at a time when sovereignty and property are separated, when the Government is centralized, when the regime is a pacific one.

The bondage which, in the tenth century, was necessary to re-established security and agriculture, is, in the eighteenth century, purposeless thralldom which impoverishes the soil and fetters the peasant.