_Tiers Etat_ in
France,--would this dominion of chicane be borne with patience, or even
conceived without horror? God forbid I should insinuate anything
derogatory to that profession which is another priesthood, administering
the rights of sacred justice! But whilst 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
comprehensive, 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 immovable barriers of laws, usages,
positive rules of doctrine and practice, counterpoised by the House of
Lords, and every moment of its existence at the discretion of the crown
to continue, prorogue, or dissolve us? The power of the House of
Commons, direct or indirect, is, indeed, great: and long may it be able
to preserve its greatness, and the spirit belonging to true greatness,
at the full!--and it will do so, as long as it can keep the breakers of
law in India from becoming the makers of law for England. 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