: in universities;-but for the far greater part, as it must in such a number, of the inferiour, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members of the profeffion. There were diftinguished excерtions; but the general composition was of obfcure provincial advocates, of stewards of petty local jurifdictions, country attornies, notaries, and the whole train of the ministers of municipal litigation, the fomenters and conductors of the petty war of village vexation. From the moment I read the lift, I fsaw distinctly, and very nearly as it has happened, all that was to follow. : The degree of estimation in which any profeffion is held becomes the standard of the estimation in which the professors hold themselves. Whatever the personal merits of many individual lawyers might have been, and in many it was undoubtedly very confiderable, in that military king. dom no part of the profession had been much regarded, except the highest of all, who often united to their professional offices great family splendour, and were invested with great power and authority. These certainly were highly respected, and even with no small degree of awe. The next rank was not much efteemed; the mechanical part was in a very low degree of repute. Whenever the supreme authority is vested in a body so composed, it must evidently produce the consequences of fupreme authority placed in the hands hands of men not taught habitually to respect themselves; who had no previous fortune in character at stake; who could not be expected to bear with moderation, or to conduct with difcretion, a power, which they themselves, more than any others, must be surprised to find in their hands. Who could flatter himself that these men, fuddenly, and, as it were, by enchantment, snatched from the humblest rank of fubordination, would not be intoxicated with their unprepared greatness? Who could conceive, that men, who are habitually meddling, daring, fubtle, active, of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds, would easily fall back into their old condition of obfcure contention, and laborious, low, and unprofitable chicane? Who could doubt but that, at any expence to the state, of which they understood nothing, they must pursue their private interests, which they understood but too well? It was not an event depending on chance or contingency. It was inevitable; it was necessary; it was planted in the nature of things. They must join (if their capacity did not permit them to lead) in any project which could procure to them a litigious constitution; which could lay open to them those innumerable lucrative jobs which follow in the train of all great convulfions and revolutions in the state, and particularly in all great and violent permutations of property. Was it to be expected that they would attend attend to the stability of property, whose existence had always depended upon whatever rendered property questionable, ambiguous, and insecure? Their objects would be enlarged with their elevation, but their difpofition and habits, and mode of accomplishing their designs, must remain the fame. Well! but these men were to be tempered and restrained by other descriptions, of more sober minds, and more enlarged understandings. Were they then to be awed by the super-eminent authority and awful dignity of a handful of countryclowns, who have feats in that assembly, some of whom are faid not to be able to read and write? and by not a greater number of traders, who, though fomewhat more instructed, and more conspicuous in the order of society, had never known any thing beyond their counting-house? No! both these descriptions were more formed to be overborne and swayed by the intrigues and artifices of lawyers, than to become their counterpoife. With such a dangerous disproportion, the whole must needs be governed by them. To the faculty of law was joined a pretty confiderable proportion of the faculty of medicine. This faculty had not, any more than that of the law, poffefsed in France its just estimation. Its professors, therefore, must have the qualities of men not habituated to sentiments of dignity. But supposing they had ranked as as they ought to do, and as with us they do ac tually, the fides of fickbeds are not the academies for forming statesmen and legiflators. Then came the dealers in stocks and funds, who must be eager, at any expence, to change their ideal paper wealth for the more folid substance of land. To these were joined men of other descriptions, from whom as little knowledge of or attention to the interests of a great state was to be expected, and as little regard to the stability of any institution; men formed to be instruments not controls. Such in general was the composition of the Tiers Etat in the national assembly; in which was scarcely to be perceived the flightest traces of what we call the natural landed interest of the country. We know that the British house of commons, without shutting its doors to any merit in any class, is, by the fure operation of adequate causes, filled with every thing illuftrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and in acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval, and politick distinction, that the country can afford. But fuppofing, what hardly can be supposed as a cafe, that the house of commons should be compofed in the fame manner with the Tiers Etat in France, would this dominion of chicane be borne with patience, or even conceived without horrour? God forbid I should infinuate any thing derogatory to that profession, which is another priesthood, ad miniftering ministering the rights of sacred justice. But whilft I revere men in the functions which belong to them, and would do, as much as one man can do, to prevent their exclusion from any, I cannot, to flatter them, give the lie to nature. They are good and useful in the composition; they must be mischievous if they preponderate so as virtually to become the whole. Their very excellence in their peculiar functions may be far from a qualification for others. It cannot escape observation, that when men are too much confined to professional and faculty habits, and, as it were, inveterate in the recurrent employment of that narrow circle, they are rather disabled than qualified for whatever depends on the knowledge of mankind, on experience in mixed affairs, on a comprehenfive connected view of the various complicated external and internal interests which go to the formation of that multifarious thing called a state. After all, if the house of commons were to have an wholly professional and faculty composition, what is the power of the house of commons, circumscribed and shut in by the immoveable barriers of laws, usages, positive rules of doctrine and practice, counterpoised by the house of lords, and every moment of its existence at the difcretion of the crown to continue, prorogue, or diffolve us? The power of the house of commons, direct or indirect, is indeed great; and long may it be able VOL. V. H to |