The power, however, of the House
of Commons, when least diminished, is as a drop of water in the ocean,
compared to that residing in a settled majority of your National
Assembly. That assembly, since the destruction of the orders, has no
fundamental law, no strict convention, no respected usage to restrain
it. Instead of finding themselves obliged to conform to a fixed
constitution, they have a power to make a constitution which shall
conform to their designs. Nothing in heaven or upon earth can serve as a
control on them. What ought to be the heads, the hearts, the
dispositions, that are qualified, or that dare, not only to make laws
under a fixed constitution, but at one heat to strike out a totally new
constitution for a great kingdom, and every part of it, from the monarch
on the throne to the vestry of a parish? But--"fools rush in where
angels fear to tread." In such a state of unbounded power, for undefined
and indefinable purposes, the evil of a moral and almost physical
inaptitude of the man to the function, must be the greatest we can
conceive to happen in the management of human affairs.
PROPERTY, MORE THAN ABILITY, REPRESENTED IN PARLIAMENT.
Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state that does not
represent its ability, as well as its property. But as ability is a
vigorous and active principle, and as property is sluggish, inert, and
timid, it never can be safe from the invasions of ability, unless it be,
out of all proportion, predominant in the representation.
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