28 CARNOT. 
minations were able to change. However, I have said 
too much not to complete the idea. 
In my youth, encouraged by the good-will and friend- 
ship with which Carnot was kind enough to honour me, 
I sometimes took the liberty of calling his recollection to 
those great epochs of our revolutionary annals, when 
parties, in their frenzied convulsions, were destroyed, 
conquered, or merely appeased, by abrupt and violent 
measures, by real coups d’état. Then I would ask our 
colleague how he, alone amongst all the others, had con- 
stantly hoped to arrive at the goal without shocks, and 
without infringement of the laws; his answer, always 
the same, had become deeply graven on my memory; 
but what was my surprise when, emerging one day from 
the round of studies which a young astronomer should 
always impose on himself, I found, word for word, this 
constant answer which we have just been discussing in 
the enunciation of a theorem of mechanics; when I saw 
that our colleague had always discoursed with me on the 
political organization of society precisely in the same 
manner as he speaks in his work of a machine, in which 
abrupt changes necessarily involve great losses of force, 
and sooner or later bring about the complete dislocation 
of the system !* 
Can it then be true, Gentlemen, that in the weakness 
of the human race, the loftiest spirits have been so little 
convinced of the goodness and truth of the determinations 
which their hearts inspire them with, that they have 
found it necessary to confirm and corroborate them with 
more or less forced assimilations ? 
* This parallel cannot be deemed exact: in the Revolution they 
wanted to destroy one machine altogether, and supply quite another; 
so the rules applicable to steady machinery, or government, do not 
apply.— Translator. 
