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 purpofely produced through the medium of confufion, begin to act, they will find themfelves, in a great measure, ftrangers to one another. The electors and elected throughout, especially in the rural cantons, will be frequently without any civil habitudes or connections, or any of that natural dif cipline which is the foul of a true republic. Magiftrates and collectors of revenue are now no longer acquainted with their districts, bifhops with their diocefes, or curates with their parishes. These new colonies of the rights of men bear a strong refemblance to that fort of military colonies which Tacitus has obferved upon in the declining policy of Rome. In better and wiser days (whatever courfe they took with foreign nations) they were careful to make the elements of a methodical fubordination and fettlement to be coeval; and eyen to lay the foundations of civil difcipline in the military*. But, when all the good arts had fallen into ruin, they * Non, ut olim, univerfæ legiones deducebantur cum tribunis, et centurionibus, et fui cujufque ordinis militibus, ut confenfu et caritate rempublicam afficerent; fed ignoti inter fe, diverfis manipulis, fine rectore, fine affectibus mutuis, quafi ex alio genere mortalium, repente in unum collecti, numerus magis quam colonia. Tac. Annal, 1. 14. fe&t. 27. `All this will be ftill more applicable to the unconnected, rotatory, biennial national affemblies, in this abfurd and fenfeless conftitution. proceeded, proceeded, as your affembly does, upon the equality of men, and with as little judgment, and as little care for those things which make a republic toler able or durable. But in this, as well as almost every inftance, your new commonwealth is born, and bred, and fed, in thofe corruptions which mark degenerated and worn out republics. Your child comes into the world with the symptoms of death; the facies Hippocratica forms the character of its phyfiognomy, and the prognostic of its fate. The legiflators who framed the antient republics knew that their bufinefs was too arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus than the metaphyfics of an under-graduate, and the mathematics and arithmetic of an excifeman. 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 ftudy the effects of those habits which are communicated by the circumftances of civil life. They were fenfible that the operation of this fecond nature on the first produced a new combination; and thence arose many diversities amongst men, according to their birth, their education, their profeffions, the periods of their lives, their refidence 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 fo many different species of animals. From hence they thought themselves obliged to dispose their citizens into fuch claffes, and to place them in fuch fituations in the ftate as their peculiar habits might qualify them to fill, and to allot to them fuch ap-. propriated propriated privileges as might fecure to them what their specific occafions required, and which might furnish to each defcription fuch force as might protect it in the conflict caused by the dis verfity of interests, that must exist, and must contend in all complex fociety: for the legislator would have been afhamed, that the coarfe hufbandman fhould well know how to affort and to use his sheep, horses, and oxen, and should have enough of common fenfe not to abstract and equalize them all into animals, without providing for each kind an appropriate food, care, and employment; whilst he, the œconomist, difpofer, and fhepherd of his own kindred, fubliming himself into an airy metaphyfician, was refolved to know nothing of his flocks, but as men in general. It is for this reason that Montefquieu obferved very justly, that in their claffification of the citizens, the great legiflators of antiquity made the greatest display of their powers, and even foared above themselves. It is here that your modern legiflators have gone deep into the negative feries, and funk even below their own nothing. As the firft fort of legislators attended to the different kinds of citizens, and combined them into one commonwealth, the others, the metaphyfical and alchemistical legiflators, have taken the direct contrary course. They have at- . tempted 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 fake of fimple telling, and not to figures whofe power is to arife from their place in the table. The elements of their own metaphyfics might have taught them better leffons. The troll of their categorical table might have informed them that there was fomething else in the intellectual world befides fubftance and quantity. They might learn from the catechifm of metaphyfics that there were eight heads more*, in every complex deliberation, which they have never thought of, though thefe, of all the ten, are the subject on which the skill of man can operate any thing at all. So far from this able disposition of some of the old republican legislators, which follows with a folicitous accuracy, the moral conditions and propenfities 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 claffing of the citizens is not of fo 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 compofes a strong barrier against the exceffes of defpotifm, as well as it is the neceffary means of giving effect and permanence to a republic. For want of fomething of this kind, if the prefent project of a republic fhould fail, all fecurities to a moderated freedom fail along with it; all the indirect restraints which mitigate defpotifm are removed; infomuch that if monarchy fhould ever again ob ** Qualitas, Relatio, A&tio, Paffio, Ubi, Quando, Situs, Habitus. tain an entire afcendency in France, under this or under any other dynasty, it will probably be, if not voluntarily tempered at fetting out, by the wife and virtuous counfels of the prince, the most completely arbitrary power that has ever appeared on earth. This is to play a most desperate game. The confufion, which attends on all fuch proceedings, they even declare to be one of their objects, and they hope to fecure their conftitution by a terror of a return of thofe evils which attended their making it. "By this," say they, "its deftruction will become difficult to authority, which cannot "break it up without the entire diforganization of the whole ftate." They prefume, that if this authority fhould ever come to the fame degree of power that they have acquired, it would make a more moderate and chaftifed ufe of it, and would piously tremble entirely to diforganise the state in the favage manner that they have done. They expect, from the virtues of returning defpotifm, the fecurity which is to be enjoyed by the offspring of their popular vices. I wish, Sir, that you and my readers would give an attentive perufal to the work of M. de Calonne, on this fubject. It is indeed not only an eloquent but an able and inftructive performance. I confine myfelf to what he fays relative to the conftitution of the new state, and to the condition of the revenue. As to the difputes of this minifter with his rivals, I do not wish to pronounce upon them. As little do I mean to hazard any opinion concerning his ways and means, financial or political, for |
