as
_auxiliaries and mediators_ it has been not at all unusual, and may be a
measure full of policy and humanity and true dignity.

The first thing we ought to do, supposing us not giving the law as
conquerors, but acting as friendly powers applied to for counsel and
assistance in the settlement of a distracted country, is well to
consider the composition, nature, and temper of its objects, and
particularly of those who actually do or who ought to exercise power in
that state. It is material to know who they are, and how constituted,
whom we consider as _the people of France_.

The next consideration is, through whom our arrangements are to be made,
and on what principles the government we propose is to be established.

The first question on the people is this: Whether we are to consider the
individuals _now actually in France, numerically taken and arranged into
Jacobin clubs_, as the body politic, constituting the nation of
France,--or whether we consider the original individual proprietors of
lands, expelled since the Revolution, and the states and the bodies
politic, such as the colleges of justice called Parliaments, the
corporations, noble and not noble, of bailliages and towns and cities,
the bishops and the clergy, as the true constituent parts of the nation,
and forming the legally organized parts of the people of France.

In this serious concern it is very necessary that we should have the
most distinct ideas annexed to the terms we employ; because it is
evident that an abuse of the term _people_ has been the original,
fundamental cause of those evils, the cure of which, by war and policy,
is the present object of all the states of Europe.

If we consider the acting power in Prance, in any legal construction of
public law, as the people, the question is decided in favor of the
republic one and indivisible. But we have decided for monarchy. If so,
we have a king and subjects; and that king and subjects have rights and
privileges which ought to be supported at home: for I do not suppose
that the government of that kingdom can or ought to be regulated by the
arbitrary mandate of a foreign confederacy.

As to the faction exercising power, to suppose that monarchy can be
supported by principled regicides, religion by professed atheists, order
by clubs of Jacobins, property by committees of proscription, and
jurisprudence by revolutionary tribunals, is to be sanguine in a degree
of which I am incapable. On them