will excite contention and
commotion in the nation for the office. Secondly, never to invest power
long in the hands of any number of individuals. The inconveniences that
may be supposed to accompany frequent changes are less to be feared than
the danger that arises from long continuance.

I shall conclude this discourse with offering some observations on the
means of _preserving liberty_; for it is not only necessary that we
establish it, but that we preserve it.

It is, in the first place, necessary that we distinguish between the
means made use of to overthrow despotism, in order to prepare the way
for the establishment of liberty, and the means to be used after the
despotism is overthrown.

The means made use of in the first case are justified by necessity.
Those means are, in general, insurrections; for whilst the established
government of despotism continues in any country it is scarcely possible
that any other means can be used. It is also certain that in the
commencement of a revolution, the revolutionary party permit to
themselves a _discretionary exercise of power_ regulated more by
circumstances than by principle, which, were the practice to continue,
liberty would never be established, or if established would soon be
overthrown. It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is
to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth
or any principle so irresistibly obvious, that all men believed it
at once. Time and reason must co-operate with each other to the final
establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be
first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction
operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct,
not to destroy.

Had a constitution been established two years ago, (as ought to have
been done,) the violences that have since desolated France and injured
the character of the revolution, would, in my opinion, have been
prevented.(1) The nation would then have had a bond of union, and every
individual would have known the line of conduct he was to follow. But,
instead of this, a revolutionary government, a thing without either
principle or authority, was substituted in its place; virtue and crime
depended upon accident; and that which was patriotism one day, became
treason the next. All these things have followed from the want of a
constitution; for it is the nature and intention of a constitution