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Part XII.
Part XII.
Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular way ought to
give us ground to presume ability. But the physician of the state, who, not
satisfied with the cure of distempers, undertakes to regenerate constitutions,
ought to show uncommon powers. Some very unusual appearances of wisdom ought
to display themselves on the face of the designs of those, who appeal to no
practice, and who copy after no model. Has any such been manifested? I shall
take a view (it shall for the subject be a very short one) of what the
Assembly has done, with regard, first, to the constitution of the legislature;
in the next place, to that of the executive power; then to that of the
judicature; afterwards to the model of the army; and conclude with the system
of finance; to see whether we can discover in any part of their schemes the
portentous ability, which may justify these bold undertakers in the
superiority which they assume over mankind.
It is in the model of the sovereign and presiding part of this new
republic, that we should expect their grand display. Here they were to prove
their title to their proud demands. For the plan itself at large, and for the
reasons on which it is grounded, I refer to the journals of the Assembly of
the 29th of September, 1789, and to the subsequent proceedings which have made
any alterations in the plan. So far as in a matter somewhat confused I can see
light, the system remains substantially as it has been originally framed. My
few remarks will be such as regard its spirit, its tendency, and its fitness
for framing a popular commonwealth, which they profess theirs to be, suited to
the ends for which any commonwealth, and particularly such a commonwealth, is
made. At the same time, I mean to consider its consistency with itself and its
own principles.
Old establishments are tried by their effects. If the people are happy,
united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be
good from whence good is derived, In old establishments various correctives
have been found for their aberrations from theory. Indeed they are the results
of various necessities and expediences. They are not often constructed after
any theory; theories are rather drawn from them. In them we often see the end
best obtained, where the means seem not perfectly reconcilable to what we may
fancy was the original scheme. The means taught by experience may be better
suited to political ends than those contrived in the original project. They
again react upon the primitive constitution, and sometimes improve the design
itself, from which they seem to have departed. I think all this might be
curiously exemplified in the British Constitution. At worst, the errors and
deviations of every kind in reckoning are found and computed, and the ship
proceeds in her course. This is the case of old establishments; but in a new
and merely theoretic system, it is expected that every contrivance shall
appear, on the face of it, to answer its ends; especially where the projectors
are no way embarrassed with an endeavour to accommodate the new building to an
old one, neither in the walls or on the foundations.
The French builders, clearing away as mere rubbish whatever they found,
and, like their ornamental gardeners, forming everything into an exact level,
propose to rest the whole local and general legislature on three bases of
three different kinds; one geometrical, one arithmetical, and the third
financial; the first of which they call the basis of territory; the second,
the basis of population; and the third, the basis of contribution. For the
accomplishment of the first of these purposes, they divide the are a of their
country into eighty-three pieces, regularly square, of eighteen leagues by
eighteen, These large divisions are called Departments. These they portion,
proceeding by square measurement, into seventeen hundred and twenty districts,
called Communes. These again they subdivide, still proceeding by square
measurement, into smaller districts called Cantons, making in all 6400.
At first view this geometrical basis of theirs, presents not much to
admire or to blame. It calls for no great legislative talents. Nothing more
than an accurate land surveyor, with his chain, sight, and theodolite, is
requisite for such a plan as this. In the old divisions of the country,
various accidents at various times, and the ebb and flow of various properties
and jurisdictions, settled their bounds, These bounds were not made upon any
fixed system undoubtedly. They were subject to some inconveniences: but they
were inconveniences for which use had found remedies, and habit had supplied
accommodation and patience. In this new pavement of square within square, and
this organization, and semi-organization, made on the system of Empedocles and
Buffon, and not upon any politic principle, it is impossible that innumerable
local inconveniences, to which men are not habituated, must not arise. But
these I pass over, because it requires an accurate knowledge of the country,
which I do not possess, to specify them.
When these state surveyors came to take a view of their work of
measurement they soon found, that in politics the most fallacious of all
things was geometrical demonstration. They had then recourse to another basis
(or rather buttress) to support the building, which tottered on that false
foundation. It was evident, that the goodness of the soil, the number of the
people, their wealth, and the largeness of their contribution, made such
infinite variations between square and square, as to render mensuration a
ridiculous standard of power in the commonwealth, and equality in geometry the
most unequal of all measures in the distribution of men. However, they could
not give it up. But dividing their political and civil representation into
three parts, they allotted one of those parts to the square measurement,
without a single fact or calculation to ascertain whether this territorial
proportion of representation was fairly assigned, and ought upon any principle
really to be a third. Having however given to geometry this portion (of a
third for her dower) out of compliment, I suppose, to that sublime science,
they left the other two to be scuffled for between the other parts, population
and contribution.
When they came to provide for population, they were not able to proceed
quite so smoothly as they had done in the field of their geometry. Here their
arithmetic came to bear upon their juridical metaphysics. Had they stuck to
their metaphysic principles, the arithmetical process would be simple indeed.
Men, with them, are strictly equal, and are entitled to equal rights in their
own government. Each head, on this system, would have its vote, and every man
would vote directly for the person who was to represent him in the
legislature. "But soft-by regular degrees, not yet." This metaphysic
principle, to which law, custom, usage, policy, reason, were to yield, is to
yield itself to their pleasure. There must be many degrees, and some stages,
before the representative can come in contact with his constituent. Indeed, as
we shall soon see, these two persons are to have no sort of communion with
each other. First, the voters in the Canton, who compose what they call
primary assemblies, are to have a qualification. What! a qualification on the
indefeasible rights of men? Yes; but it shall be a very small qualification.
Our injustice shall be very little oppressive; only the local valuation of
three days` labour paid to the public. Why, this is not much, I readily admit,
for anything but the utter subversion of your equalising principle. As a
qualification it might as well be let alone; for it answers no one purpose for
which qualifications are established; and, on your ideas, it excludes from a
vote the man of all others whose natural equality stands the most in need of
protection and defence: I mean the man who has nothing else but his natural
equality to guard him. You order him to buy the right, which you before told
him nature had given to him gratuitously at his birth, and of which no
authority on earth could lawfully deprive him. With regard to the person who
cannot come up to your market, a tyrannous aristocracy, as against him, is
established at the very outset, by you who pretend to be its sworn foe.
The gradation proceeds. These primary assemblies of the Canton elect
deputies to the Commune; one for every two hundred qualified inhabitants. Here
is the first medium put between the primary elector and the representative
legislator; and here a new turnpike is fixed for taxing the rights of men with
a second qualification: for none can be elected into the Commune who does not
pay the amount of ten days` labour. Nor have we yet done. There is still to be
another gradation. ^45 These Communes, chosen by the Canton, choose to the
Department; and the deputies of the Department choose their deputies to the
National Assembly. Here is a third barrier of a senseless qualification. Every
deputy to the National Assembly must pay, in direct contribution, to the value
of a mark of silver. Of all these qualifying barriers we must think alike;
that they are impotent to secure independence; strong only to destroy the
rights of men.
[Footnote 45: The Assembly, in executing the plan of their committee, made
some alterations. They have struck out one stage in these gradations; this
removes a part of the objection; but the main objection, namely, that in their
scheme the first constituent voter has no connexion with the representative
legislator, remains in all its force. There are other alterations, some
possibly for the better, some certainly for the worse; but to the author the
merit or demerit of these smaller alterations appears to be of no moment,
where the scheme itself is fundamentally vicious and absurd.]
In all this process, which in its fundamental elements affects to
consider only population upon a principle of natural right, there is a
manifest attention to property; which, however just and reasonable on other
schemes, is on theirs perfectly unsupportable.
When they come to their third basis, that of Contribution, we find that
they have more completely lost sight of their rights of men. This last basis
rests entirely on property. A principle totally different from the equality of
men, and utterly irreconcilable to it, is thereby admitted; but no sooner is
this principle admitted, than (as usual) it is subverted; and it is not
subverted (as we shall presently see) to approximate the inequality of riches
to the level of nature. The additional share in the third portion of
representation (a portion reserved exclusively for the higher contribution) is
made to regard the district only, and not the individuals in it who pay. It is
easy to perceive, by the course of their reasonings, how much they were
embarrassed by their contradictory ideas of the rights of men and the
privileges of riches. The committee of constitution do as good as admit that
they are wholly irreconcilable. "The relation with regard to the
contributions, is without doubt null (say they) when the question is on the
balance of the political rights as between individual and individual; without
which personal equality would be destroyed, and an aristocracy of the rich
would be established. But this inconvenience entirely disappears when the
proportional relation of the contribution is only considered in the great
masses, and is solely between province and province; it serves in that case
only to form a just reciprocal proportion between the cities, without
affecting the personal rights of the citizens."
Here the principle of contribution, as taken between man and man, is
reprobated as null, and destructive to equality and as pernicious too; because
it leads to the establishment of an aristocracy of the rich. However, it must
not be abandoned. And the way of getting rid of the difficulty is to establish
the inequality as between department and department, leaving all the
individuals in each department upon an exact par. Observe, that this parity
between individuals had been before destroyed, when the qualifications within
the departments were settled; nor does it seem a matter of great importance
whether the equality of men be injured by masses or individually. An
individual is not of the same importance in a mass represented by a few, as in
a mass represented by many. It would be too much to tell a man jealous of his
equality, that the elector has the same franchise who votes for three members
as he who votes for ten.
Now take it in the other point of view, and let us suppose their
principle of representation according to contribution, that is, according to
riches, to be well imagined, and to be a necessary basis for their republic.
In this their third basis they assume, that riches ought to be respected, and
that justice and policy require that they should entitle men, in some mode or
other, to a larger share in the administration of public affairs; it is now to
be seen how the Assembly provides for the pre-eminence, or even for the
security, of the rich, by conferring, in virtue of their opulence, that larger
measure of power to their district which is denied to them personally. I
readily admit (indeed I should lay it down as a fundamental principle) that in
a republican government, which has a democratic basis, the rich do require an
additional security above what is necessary to them in monarchies. They are
subject to envy, and through envy to oppression. On the present scheme it is
impossible to divine what advantage they derive from the aristocratic
preference upon which the unequal representation of the masses is founded. The
rich cannot feel it, either as a support to dignity, or as security to
fortune: for the aristocratic mass is generated from purely democratic
principles; and the preference given to it in the general representation has
no sort of reference to, or connexion with, the persons, upon account of whose
property this superiority of the mass is established. If the contrivers of
this scheme meant any sort of favour to the rich, in consequence of their
contribution, they ought to have conferred the privilege either on the
individual rich, or on some class formed of rich persons (as historians
represent Servius Tullius to have done in the early constitution of Rome);
because the contest between the rich and the poor is not a struggle between
corporation and corporation, but a contest between men and men; a competition
not between districts, but between descriptions. It would answer its purpose
better if the scheme were inverted; that the votes of the masses were rendered
equal; and that the votes within each mass were proportioned to property.
Let us suppose one man in a district (it is an easy supposition) to
contribute as much as an hundred of his neighbours. Against these he has but
one vote. If there were but one representative for the mass, his poor
neighbours would outvote him by an hundred to one for that single
representative. Bad enough. But amends are to be made him. How? The district,
in virtue of his wealth, is to choose, say ten members instead of one: that is
to say, by paying a very large contribution he has the happiness of being
outvoted, an hundred to one, by the poor, for ten representatives, instead of
being outvoted exactly in the same proportion for a single member. In truth,
instead of benefiting by this superior quantity of representation, the rich
man is subjected to an additional hardship. The increase of representation
within his province sets up nine persons more, and as many more than nine as
there may be democratic candidates, to cabal and intrigue, and to flatter the
people at his expense and to his oppression. An interest is by this means held
out to multitudes of the inferior sort, in obtaining a salary of eighteen
livres a day, (to them a vast object,) besides the pleasure of a residence in
Paris, and their share in the government of the kingdom. The more the objects
of ambition are multiplied and become democratic, just in that proportion the
rich are endangered.
Thus it must fare between the poor and the rich in the province deemed
aristocratic, which in its internal relation is the very reverse of that
character. In its external relation, that is, its relation to the other
provinces, I cannot see how the unequal representation, which is given to
masses on account of wealth, becomes the means of preserving the equipoise and
the tranquility of the commonwealth. For if it be one of the objects to secure
the weak from being crushed by the strong, (as in all society undoubtedly it
is,) how are the smaller and poorer of these masses to be saved from the
tyranny of the more wealthy? Is it by adding to the wealthy further and more
systematical means of oppressing them? When we come to a balance of
representation between corporate bodies, provincial interests, emulations, and
jealousies are full as likely to arise among them as among individuals; and
their divisions are likely to produce a much hotter spirit of dissension, and
something leading much more nearly to a war.
I see that these aristocratic masses are made upon what is called the
principle of direct contribution. Nothing can be a more unequal standard than
this. The indirect contribution, that which arises from duties on consumption,
is in truth a better standard, and follows and discovers wealth more naturally
than this of direct contribution. It is difficult indeed to fix a standard of
local preference on account of the one, or of the other, or of both, because
some provinces may pay the more of either or of both, on account of causes not
intrinsic, but originating from those very districts over whom they have
obtained a preference in consequence of their ostensible contribution. If the
masses were independent, sovereign bodies, who were to provide for a
federative treasury by distinct contingents, and that the revenue had not (as
it has) many impositions running through the whole, which affect men
individually, and not corporately, and which, by their nature, confound all
territorial limits, something might be said for the basis of contribution as
founded on masses. But of all things, this representation, to be measured by
contribution, is the most difficult to settle upon principles of equity in a
country, which considers its districts as members of a whole. For a great
city, such as Bourdeaux, or Paris, appears to pay a vast body of duties,
almost out of all assignable proportion to other places, and its mass is
considered accordingly. But are these cities the true contributors in that
proportion? No. The consumers of the commodities imported into Bourdeaux, who
are scattered through all France, pay the import duties of Bourdeaux. The
produce of the vintage in Guienne and Languedoc, give to that city the means
of its contribution growing out of an export commerce. The landholders who
spend their estates in Paris, and are thereby the creators of that city,
contribute for Paris from the provinces out of which their revenues arise.
Very nearly the same arguments will apply to the representative share given on
account of direct contributions: because the direct contribution must be
assessed on wealth real or presumed; and that local wealth will itself arise
from causes not local, and which therefore in equity ought not to produce a
local preference.
It is very remarkable, that in this fundamental regulation, which settles
the representation of the mass upon the direct contribution, they have not yet
settled how that direct contribution shall be laid, and how apportioned.
Perhaps there is some latent policy towards the continuance of the present
Assembly in this strange procedure. However, until they do this, they can have
no certain constitution. It must depend at last upon the system of taxation,
and must vary with every variation in that system. As they have contrived
matters, their taxation does not so much depend on their constitution, as
their constitution on their taxation. This must introduce great confusion
among the masses; as the variable qualification for votes within the district
must, if ever real contested elections take place, cause infinite internal
controversies.
To compare together the three bases, not on their political reason, but
on the ideas on which the Assembly works, and to try its consistency with
itself, we cannot avoid observing, that the principle which the committee call
the basis of population, does not begin to operate from the same point with
the two other principles called the bases of territory and of contribution,
which are both of an aristocratic nature. The consequence is, that where all
three begin to operate together, there is the most absurd inequality produced
by the operation of the former on the two latter principles. Every canton
contains four square leagues, and is estimated to contain, on the average,
4000 inhabitants, or 680 voters in the primary assemblies, which vary in
numbers with the population of the canton, and send one deputy to the commune
for every 200 voters. Nine cantons make a commune.
Now let us take a canton containing a sea-port town of trade, or a great
manufacturing town. Let us suppose the population of this canton to be 12,700
inhabitants, or 2193 voters, forming three primary assemblies, and sending ten
deputies to the commune.
Oppose to this one canton two others of the remaining eight in the same
commune. These we may suppose to have their fair population of 4000
inhabitants and 680 voters each, or 8000 inhabitants and 1360 voters, both
together. These will form only two primary assemblies, and send only six
deputies to the commune.
When the assembly of the commune comes to vote on the basis of territory,
which principle is first admitted to operate in that assembly, the single
canton, which has half the territory of the other two, will have ten voices to
six in the election of three deputies to the assembly of the department,
chosen on the express ground of all representation of territory. This
inequality, striking as it is, will be yet highly aggravated, if we suppose,
as we fairly may, the several other cantons of the commune to fall
proportionably short of the average population, as much as the principal
canton exceeds it.
Now as to the basis of contribution, which also is a principle admitted
first to operate in the assembly of the commune. Let us again take one canton,
such as is stated above. If the whole of the direct contributions paid by a
great trading or manufacturing town be divided equally among the inhabitants,
each individual will be found to pay much more than an individual living in
the country according to the same average. The whole paid by the inhabitants
of the former will be more than the whole paid by the inhabitants of the
latter - we may fairly assume one-third more. Then the 12,700 inhabitants, or
2193 voters of the canton, will pay as much as 19,050 inhabitants, or 3289
voters of the other cantons, which are nearly the estimated proportion of
inhabitants and voters of five other cantons. Now the 2193 voters will, as I
before said, send only ten deputies to the assembly; the 3289 voters will send
sixteen. Thus, for an equal share in the contribution of the whole commune,
there will be a difference of sixteen voices to ten in voting for deputies to
be chosen on the principle of representing the general contribution of the
whole commune.
By the same mode of computation we shall find 15,875 inhabitants, or 2741
voters of the other cantons, who pay one-sixth Less to the contribution of the
whole commune, will have three Voices More than the 12,700 inhabitants, or
2193 voters of the one canton.
Such is the fantastical and unjust inequality between mass and mass, in
this curious repartition of the rights of representation arising out of
territory and contribution. The qualifications which these confer are in truth
negative qualifications, that give a right in an inverse proportion to the
possession of them.
In this whole contrivance of the three bases, consider it in any light
you please, I do not see a variety of objects reconciled in one consistent
whole, but several contradictory principles reluctantly and irreconcilably
brought and held together by your philosophers, like wild beasts shut up in a
cage, to claw and bite each other to their mutual destruction.
I am afraid I have gone too far into their way of considering the
formation of a constitution. They have much, but bad, metaphysics; much, but
bad, geometry; much, but false, proportionate arithmetic; but if it were all
as exact as metaphysics, geometry, and arithmetic ought to be, and if their
schemes were perfectly consistent in all their parts, it would make only a
more fair and sightly vision. It is remarkable, that, in a great arrangement
of mankind, not one reference whatsoever is to be found to anything moral or
anything politic; nothing that relates to the concerns, the actions, the
passions, the interests of men. Hominem non sapiunt.
You see I only consider this constitution as electoral, and leading by
steps to the National Assembly. I do not enter into the internal government of
the departments, and their genealogy through the communes and cantons. These
local governments are, in the original plan, to be as nearly as possible
composed in the same manner and on the same principles with the elective
assemblies. They are each of them bodies perfectly compact and rounded in
themselves.
You cannot but perceive in this scheme, that it has a direct and
immediate tendency to sever France into a variety of republics, and to render
them totally independent of each other without any direct constitutional means
of coherence, connexion, or subordination, except what may be derived from
their acquiescence in the determinations of the general congress of the
ambassadors from each independent republic. Such in reality is the National
Assembly, and such governments I admit do exist in the world, though in forms
infinitely more suitable to the local and habitual circumstances of their
people. But such associations, rather than bodies politic, have generally been
the effect of necessity, not choice; and I believe the present French power is
the very first body of citizens, who, having obtained full authority to do
with their country what they pleased, have chosen to dissever it in this
barbarous manner.
It is impossible not to observe, that, in the spirit of this geometrical
distribution, and arithmetical arrangement, these pretended citizens treat
France exactly like a country of conquest. Acting as conquerors, they have
imitated the policy of the harshest of that harsh race. The policy of such
barbarous victors, who contemn a subdued people, and insult their feelings,
has ever been, as much as in them lay, to destroy all vestiges of the ancient
country, in religion, in polity, in laws, and in manners; to confound all
territorial limits; to produce a general poverty; to put up their properties
to auction; to crush their princes, nobles, and pontiffs; to lay low
everything which had lifted its head above the level, or which could serve to
combine or rally, in their distresses, the disbanded people, under the
standard of old opinion. They have made France free in the manner in which
those sincere friends to the rights of mankind, the Romans, freed Greece,
Macedon, and other nations. They destroyed the bonds of their union, under
colour of providing for the independence of each of their cities.
When the members who compose these new bodies of cantons, communes, and
departments, arrangements purposely produced through the medium of confusion,
begin to act, they will find themselves in a great measure strangers to one
another. The electors and elected throughout, especially in the rural cantons,
will be frequently without any civil habitudes or connexions, or any of that
natural discipline which is the soul of a true republic. Magistrates and
collectors of revenue are now no longer acquainted with their districts,
bishops with their dioceses, or curates with their parishes. These new
colonies of the rights of men bear a strong resemblance to that sort of
military colonies which Tacitus has observed upon in the declining policy of
Rome. In better and wiser days (whatever course they took with foreign
nations) they were careful to make the elements of methodical subordination
and settlement to be coeval; and even to lay the foundations of civil
discipline in the military. ^46 But, when all the good arts had fallen into
ruin, they proceeded, as your Assembly does, upon the equality of men, and
with as little judgment, and as little care for those things which make a
republic tolerable or durable. But in this, as well as almost every instance,
your new commonwealth is born, and bred, and fed, in those corruptions which
mark degenerated and worn-out republics. Your child comes into the world with
the symptoms at death; the facies Hippocratica forms the character of its
physiognomy, and the prognostic of its fate.
[Footnote 46: Non, ut olim, universae legiones deducebantur cum tribunis, et
centurionibus, et sui cujusque ordinis militibus, ut consensu et caritate
rempublicam afficerent; sed ignoti inter se, diversis manipulis, sine rectore,
sine affectibus mutuis, quasi ex alio genere mortalium, repente in unum
collecti, numerus magis quam colonia. Tac. Annal. I. 14, sect. 27. All this
will be still more applicable to the unconnected, rotatory, biennal national
assemblies, in this absurd and senseless constitution.]
The legislators who framed the ancient republics knew that their business
was too arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus than the
metaphysics of an undergraduate, and the mathematics and arithmetic of an
exciseman. They had to do with men, and they were obliged to study human
nature. They had to do with citizens, and they were obliged to study the
effects of those habits which are communicated by the circumstances of civil
life. They were sensible that the operation of this second nature on the first
produced a new combination; and thence arose many diversities amongst men,
according to their birth, their education, their professions, the periods of
their lives, their residence in towns or in the country, their several ways of
acquiring and of fixing property, and according to the quality of the property
itself, all which rendered them as it were so many different species of
animals. From hence they thought themselves obliged to dispose their citizens
into such classes, and to place them in such situations in the state, as their
peculiar habits might qualify them to fill, and to allot to them such
appropriated privileges as might secure to them what their specific occasions
required, and which might furnish to each description such force as might
protect it in the conflict caused by the div rsity of interests, that must
exist, and must contend, in all complex society: for the legislator would have
been ashamed, that the coarse husbandman should well know how to assort and to
use his sheep, horses, and oxen, and should have enough of common sense, not
to abstract and equalize them all into animals, without providing for each
kind an appropriate food, care, and employment; whilst he, the economist,
disposer, and shepherd of his own kindred, subliming himself into an airy
metaphysician, was resolved to know nothing of his flocks but as men in
general. It is for this reason that Montesquieu observed very justly, that in
their classification of the citizens, the great legislators of antiquity made
the greatest display of their powers, and even soared above themselves. It is
here that your modern legislators have gone deep into the negative series, and
sunk even below their own nothing. As the first sort of legislators attended
to the different kinds of citizens, and combined them into one commonwealth,
the others, the metaphysical and alchemistical legislators, have taken the
direct contrary course. They have attempted to confound all sorts of citizens,
as well as they could, into one homogeneous mass; and then they divided this
their amalgama into a number of incoherent republics. They reduce men to loose
counters, merely for the sake of simple telling, and not to figures whose
power is to arise from their place in the table. The elements of their own
metaphysics might have taught them better lessons. The troll of their
categorical table might have informed them that there was something else in
the intellectual world besides substance and quantity. They might learn from
the catechism of metaphysics that there were eight heads more, ^47 in every
complex deliberation, which they have never thought of; though these, of all
the ten, are the subjects on which the skill of man can operate anything at
all.
[Footnote 47: Qualitas, Relatio, Actio, Passio, Ubi, Quando, Situs, Habitus.]
So far from this able disposition of some of the old republican
legislators, which follows with a solicitous accuracy the moral conditions and
propensities of men, they have levelled and crushed together all the orders
which they found, even under the coarse unartificial arrangement of the
monarchy, in which mode of government the classing of the citizens is not of
so much importance as in a republic. It is true, however, that every such
classification, if properly ordered, is good in all forms of government; and
composes a strong barrier against the excesses of despotism, as well as it is
the necessary means of giving effect and permanence to a republic. For want of
something of this kind, if the present project of a republic should fail, all
securities to a moderated freedom fail along with it; all the indirect
restraints which mitigate despotism are removed; insomuch that if monarchy
should ever again obtain an entire ascendancy in France, under this or under
any other dynasty, it will probably be, if not voluntarily tempered, at
setting out, by the wise and virtuous counsels of the prince, the most
completely arbitrary power that has ever appeared on earth. This is to play a
most desperate game.
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