totally independent of each other, without any di rect constitutional means of coherence, connection, or fubordination, except what may be derived from their acquiefcence in the determinations of the general congress of the ambaffadors from each independent republick. Such in reality is the national affembly, and fuch governments I admit do exist in the world, though in forms infinitely more fuitable to the local and habitual circumstances of their people. But such associations, rather than bodies politick, have generally been the effect of neceffity, 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 diffever it in this barbarous manner.

It is impoffible not to obferve, that in the fpirit 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 harsheft of that harsh race. The policy of fuch barbarous victors, who contemn a fubdued 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;

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tiffs; to lay low every thing 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 confufion, 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 connections, or any of that natural discipline which is the foul of a true republick. Magistrates and collectors of revenue are now no longer acquainted with their districts, bishops with their dioceses, or curates with their parishes. Thefe new colonies of the rights of men bear a strong resemblance to that fort of military colonies which Tacitus has observed upon in the declining policy of Rome. In better and wifer days (whatever course they took with foreign nations) they were careful to make the elements of a methodical fubordination and fettle

fettlement to be coeval; and even to lay the foundations of discipline in the military. * 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 republick 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 republicks. Your child comes into the world with the symptoms of death; the facies Hippocratica forms the character of its physiognomy, and the prognostick of its

fate.

The legiflators who framed the ancient republicks knew that their business was too arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus than the metaphysicks of an under graduate, and the mathematicks and arithmetick 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 fuch 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 specifick occasions required, and which might furnish to each description fuch force as might protect it in the conflict caused by the diversity of interests, that must exist, and must contend, in all complex fociety: for the legiflator would have been ashamed, that the coarse hufbandman should well know how to affort and to use his sheep, horfes, 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, fubliming himself into into an airy metaphysician, was refolved 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 legiflators of antiquity made the greatest display of their powers, and even foared above themselves. It is here that your modern legifla tors have gone deep into the negative series, and funk even below their own nothing. As the first fort of legislators attended to the different kinds of citizens, and combined them into one commonwealth, the others, the metaphyfical and alchemif tical legiflators, have taken the direct contrary course. They have attempted to confound all forts of citizens, as well as they could, into one homogeneous mass; and then they divided this their amalgama into a number of incoherent republicks. They reduce men to loose counters, merely for the fake of fimple telling, and not to figures whose power is to arife from their place in the table. The elements of their own metaphyficks might have taught them better lessons. The troll of their categorical table might have informed them that there was fomething elfe in the intellectual world besides substance and quantity. They might learn from the catechism of metaphyficks that there were eight heads more,* in every complex deliberation, which they have never thought