sions that placed factious and selfish men on a level with patriots and heroes, has now ranked the blameless and the enlightened in the herd of murderers and madmen.

There are two classes of men in particular, to whom the revolution has thus done injustice, and who have been made to share in some measure the infamy of its most detestable agents, in consequence of venial errors, and in spite of extraordinary merits. There are none indeed who made a figure in its more advanced stages, that may not be left, without any breach of charity, to the vengeance of public opinion; and both the meritorious or at least innocent classes of persons only existed, accordingly, at the period of its commencement. These were the philosophers or speculatists who inculcated a love of liberty and a desire of reform by their writings and conversation; and the virtuous and moderate, who attempted to act on these principles at the opening of the revolution, and countenanced or suggested those measures by which the ancient frame of government was finally dissolved. To confound either of these classes with the monsters by whom they were succeeded, it would be necessary to forget that they were in reality their most strenuous opponents, and their earliest victims. If they were instrumental in conjuring up the tempest, we may at least presume that their co-operation was granted in ignor. ance, since they were the first to fall before it; and can scarcely be supposed to have either foreseen or intended those consequences, in which their own ruin was so inevitably involved. That they are charg. able with imprudence and presumption may be admitted, though, with regard to many of them, it would be no easy task, perhaps, to point out by what conduct they could have avoided such an imputation; and this charge, it is manifest, ought at any rate to be kept carefully separate from that of guilt. Benevolent intentions, though alloyed by vanity, and misguided by ignorance, can ne

ver become the objects of the highest moral condemnation; and enthusiasm itself, though it does the work of devils, ought still to be distinguished from treachery or malice. The knightly adventurer, who broke the chains of the galley-slaves, purely that they might enjoy their deliverance from bondage, will always be regarded with other feelings than the robber who freed them to recruit the ranks of his banditti.

If we examine impartially the extent of the participation, fairly imputable to the philosophers, in the crimes and miseries of the revolution, and endeavour to ascertain how far they were responsible for its consequences, or deserve censure for their exertions, we shall be obliged to acquit the greater part of any mischievous intention, and to conclude, that there was nothing in the conduct of the majority which should expose them to blame, or deprive them of the credit which they would have certainly enjoyed, but for consequences which they could not foresee. For those who, with intentions equally blameless, attempted to carry into execution the projects which had been suggested by the others, and actually engaged in measures which could not fail to terminate in important changes, it will not be easy to make so satisfactory an apology. What is written may be corrected; but what is done cannot be recalled: a rash and injudicious publication naturally calls forth a host of answers; and where the subject of discussion is such as excites a very powerful interest, the cause of truth is not always least effectually served by her opponents. But the errors of cabinets and legislatures have other consequences, and other confutations. They are answered by insurrections, and confuted by conspiracies; a paradox which might have been maintained by an author, without any other loss than that of a little leisure, and ink, and paper, can only be supported by a minister at the expence of the lives and the liberties of a nation. It is evident, therefore, that

the precipitation of a legislator can never admit of the same excuse with that of a speculative inquirer; that the same confidence in his opinions, which justifies the former in maintaining them to the world, will never justify the other in suspending the happiness of his country on the issue of their truth; and that he, in particular, subjects himself to a tremendous responsibility, who voluntarily takes on himself the newmodelling of an ancient constitution. Much praise is due to the virtuous and enlightened men who abounded in the constituent assembly of France. The motives of many of them were pure, and their patriotism unaffected; ther talents are still more indisputable: but they cannot be acquitted of blamable presumption and inexcusable imprudence. There are three points, in which they were bound to have foreseen the consequences of their proceedings.

In the first place, the spirit of exasperation and defiance, with which, from the beginning, they carried on their opposition to the schemes of the court, the clergy, and the nobility, was as impolitic with a view to their ultimate success, as it was suspicious as to their immediate motives. The parade which they made of their popularity; the support which they submitted to receive from the menaces and acclamations of the mob; the joy which they testified at the desertion of the royal armies; and the anomalous military force, of which they patronised the formation in the city of Paris, were so many preparations for actual hostility, and led almost inevitably to that appeal to force, by which all prospect of establishing an equitable government was finally cut off.

Sanguine as the patriots of that assembly undoubtedly were, they might still have remembered the most obvious and important lesson in the whole volume of history, that the nation which has recourse to arms for the settlement of its internal affairs, necessarily falls under the iron yoke of a military government in the end, and that nothing

but the most evident necessity can justify the lovers of freedom in forcing it from the hands of their governors. In France, there certainly was no such necessity. The whole weight and strength of the nation was bent on political improvement and reform. There was no possibility of their being ultimately resisted; and the only danger to be apprehended was, that their progress would be too rapid.

After the states-general were granted, indeed, the victory of the friends to liberty was ascertained. They could not have gone too slowly afterwards; they could not have been satisfied with too little. The great object was to exclude the agency of force, and to leave no pretext for an appeal to violence. Nothing could have stood against the force of reason, which ought to have given way; and from a monarch of the character of Louis XVI, there was no reason to apprehend any attempt to regain, by violence, what he had yielded from philanthropy and conviction. The third estate would have grown into power, instead of usurping it; and would have gradually compressed the other orders into their proper dimensions, instead of displacing them by a vio lence that could never be forgiven. Even if the orders had deliberated separately, as they ought to have done, the commons were sure of an ultimate preponderance, and the government of a permanent improvement. Convened in a legislative assembly, and engrossing almost entirely the respect and affections of the nation, they would have enjoyed the unlimited liberty of political discussion, and gradually impressed on the government the character of their peculiar principles. By the restoration of the legislative func. tion to the commons of the kingdom, the system was rendered complete, and required only to be put into action, in order to assume all those improvements which necessarily resulted from the increased wealth and intelligence of its representatives.

Of this fair chance of happiness and liberty the nation was disappointed, chiefly by the needless asperity and injudicious menaces of the popular party. They relied openly on the strength of their adherents among the populace. If they did not actually encourage them to threats and to acts of violence, they availed themselves at least of those which were committed, to intimidate and depress their opponents; for it is indisputably certain, that the unconditional compliance of the court with all the demands of the constituent assembly, was the result either of actual force, or the dread of its immediate application. This was the inauspicious commencement of the sins and the sufferings of the revolution. Their progress and termination were natural and necessary. The multitude, once allowed to overawe the old government with threats, soon subjected the new government to the same degradation, and, once permitted to act in arms, came speedily to dictate to those who were assembled to deliberate. As soon as an appeal was made to force, the decision came to be with those by whom force could at all times be commanded. Reason and philosophy were discarded, and mere terror and brute violence, in the various forms of proscriptions, insurrections, massacres, and military executions, harassed and distracted the misguided nation, till, by a natural consummation, they fell under the despotic sceptre of a military usurper. These consequences were obvious, and might have been easily foreseen. Nearly half a century had clapsed since they were pointed out in these memora ble words of Hume, the most profound and philosophical of historians. "By recent, as well as by ancient example, it was become evident, that illegal violence, with whatever pretences it may be covered, and whatever object it may pursue, must inevitably end at last in the arbitrary and despotic government of a single person."

The second inexcusable blunder of which the constituent assembly was guilty, was the extreme restlessness and precipitation with which they proceeded to accomplish, in a few weeks, the legislative labours of a century. Their constitution was struck out at a heat, and their measures of reform proposed and adopted like toasts at an anniversary dinner. Within less than six months from the period of their first convocation, they declared the illegality of all subsisting taxes; they abolished the old constitution of the statesgeneral; they settled the limits of the royal prerogative, their own inviolability, and the responsibility of ministers. Before they put any one of their projects to the test of exriment, they had adopted such a multitude as entirely to change the condition of the country, and to expose even those which were salutary to misapprehension and miscarriage. From a scheme of reformation so impetuous, and an impatience so puerile, nothing permanent or judicious could be reasonably expected.

In legislating for their country, they seem to have forgotten that they were operating on a living and sentient substance, and not on an inert and passive mass, which they might model and compound according to their pleasure or their fancy. Human society is not like a piece of mechanism, which may be safely taken to pieces and put together by the hands of an ordinary artist. It is the work of nature, and not of man; and has received, from the hands of its author, an organization that cannot be destroyed without danger to its existence, and certain properties and powers that cannot be altered or suspended by those who may have been entrusted with its management. By studying these properties, and directing those powers, it may be modified and altered to a considerable extent.

A child cannot be stretched out by engines to the stature of a man, nor a man compelled, in a morning,

to excel in all the exercises of an athlete. Those into whose hands the destinies of a great nation are committed, should bestow on its reformation at least as much patient observance, and as much tender precaution, as are displayed by a skilful gardener in his treatment of a sickly plant. He props up those branches that are weak or overloaded, and gradually prunes and reduces those that are too luxuriant: he cuts away what is absolutely rotten and distempered he stirs the earth about the root, and sprinkles it with water, and waits for the coming spring: he trains the young branches to the right hand or the left; and leads it, by a gradual and spontaneous progress, to expand or exalt itself, season after season, in the direction which he had previously determined: and thus, in the course of a few summers, he brings it, without injury or compulsion, into that form and proportion which could not with safety have been imposed on it in a shorter time. The reformers of France applied no such gentle solicitations, and could not wait for the effects of any such preparatory measures, or voluntary tendencies. They forcibly broke over its lofty boughs, and endeavoured to straighten its crooked joints by violence: they tortured it into symmetry in vain, and shed its life-blood on the earth, in the middle of its scattered branches.

The third great danger against which it was the duty of the intelligent and virtuous part of the deputies to provide, was that which arose from the sudden transferrence of power to the hands of men who had previously no natural or individual influence in the community. This was an evil, indeed, which arose necessarily, in some degree, from the defects of the old govern ment, and from the novelty of the situation in which the country was placed by the convocation of the States-general; but it was materially aggravated by the presumption and improvidence of those enthusi

VOL. VI. NO. XXXV111.

astic legislators, and tended power. fully to produce those disasters by which they were ultimately overwhelmed.

No representative legislature can ever be respectable or secure, unless it contain within itself a great pro portion of those who form the natu ral aristocracy of the country, and are able, as individuals, to influence the conduct and opinions of the greater part of its inhabitants. Unless the power, and weight, and authority of the assembly, in short, be really made up of the power, and weight, and authority of the in dividuals who compose it, the factitious dignity they may derive from their situation can never be of long endurance; and the dangerous power with which they may be invested will become the subject of scrambling and contention among the factions of the metropolis, and be employed for any purpose but the general good of the community.

In England, the house of commons is made up of the individuals who, by birth, fortune, or talents, possess singly the greatest influence over the rest of the people.The most certain and the most permanent influence is that of rank and riches; and these are qualifications, accordingly, which return the greatest number of members. Men submit to be governed by the united will of those, to whose will, as individuals, the greater part of them have been previously accustomed to submit themselves; and an act of parliament is reverenced and obeyed, not solely because the people are impressed with the constitutional veneration for an institution called a parliament, but because it has been passed by the authority of those who are recognized as their natural superiors, and by whose influence, as individuals, the same measures might have been enforced over the greater part of the kingdom. Scarcely any new power is acquired, therefore, by the combination of those persons into a legislature : they carry each their share of influ

5

ence and authority into the senate along with them; and it is by adding the items of it together, that the influence and authority of the senate itself is made up. From such a senate, therefore, it is obvious that their power can never be wrested, and that it would not even attach to those who might succeed in supplanting them in the legislature, by violence or intrigue, or by any other means than those by which they themselves had originally secured their nomination. In such a state of representation, in short, the influence of the representatives is not borrowed from their office, but the influence of the office is supported by that which is personal to its members; and parliament is only regarded as the great depositary of all the authority which formerly existed, in a scattered state, among its members. This authority, therefore, belonging to the men, and not to their places, can neither be lost by them, if they are forced from their places, nor found by those who may supplant

them.

The long parliament, after it was purged by the independents, and the assemblies that met under that name, during the protectorate of Cromwell, held the place, and enjoyed all the form of power, that had belonged to their predecessors; but as they no longer contained those individuals who were able to sway and influence the opinion of the body of the people, they were without respect or authority, and speedily came to be the objects of public derision and contempt.

As the power and authority of the legislature, thus constituted, is perfectly secure and inalienable on the one hand, so, on the other, the moderation of its proceedings is guaranteed by a consciousness of the basis on which this authority is founded. Every individual, being aware of the extent to which his own influence is likely to reach among his constituents and dependents, is anxious that the mandates of the body shall never pass beyond that limit, within which

obedience may be easily secured. He will not hazard the loss of his own power, therefore, by any attempt to enlarge that of the legislature; and feeling, at every step, the weight and resistance of the people, the whole assembly proceeds with a due regard to their opinions and prejudices, and can never do any thing very injurious or very distasteful to the majority.

From the very nature of the authority with which they are invested, they are in fact consubstantiated with the people for whom they are to legislate. They do not sit loose upon them, like riders on race horses, nor speculate nor project experiments upon their welfare, like operators on a foreign substance. They are the natural organs of a great living body, and are not only warned, by their own feelings, of any injury which they may be tempted to inflict on it, but would become incapable of performing their functions, if they were to proceed far in debilitating the general system.

Such is the just conception of a free representative legislature.→ Neither the English house of commons, indeed, nor any assembly of any other nation, ever realized it in all its perfection; but it is in their approximation to such a standard that their excellence and utility will be found to consist; and where these conditions are absolutely wanting, the sudden institution of a represen tative legislature will only be a step to the most frightful disorders. Where it is grown up in a country in which personal liberty and property are tolerably secure, it naturally assumes that form which is most favourable to its beneficial influence, and has a tendency to its own perpetual improvement, and to that of the condition of the whole society.

The difference between a free government and a tyrannical one consists entirely in the different proportions of the people that are influenced by their opinion, or subjugated by force. In a large society, opinions can only be re-united by