their favor. They avow their
hostility to opinion. Of course they must expect no support from that
influence, which, with every other authority, they have deposed from the
seat of its jurisdiction.

I can never consider this Assembly as anything else than a voluntary
association of men who have availed themselves of circumstances to seize
upon the power of the state. They have not the sanction and authority of
the character under which they first met. They have assumed another of a
very different nature, and have completely altered and inverted all the
relations in which they originally stood. They do not hold the authority
they exercise under any constitutional law of the state. They have
departed from the instructions of the people by whom they were sent;
which instructions, as the Assembly did not act in virtue of any ancient
usage or settled law, were the sole source of their authority. The most
considerable of their acts have not been done by great majorities; and
in this sort of near divisions, which carry only the constructive
authority of the whole, strangers will consider reasons as well as
resolutions.

If they had set up this new, experimental government as a necessary
substitute for an expelled tyranny, mankind would anticipate the time of
prescription, which through long usage mellows into legality governments
that were violent in their commencement. All those who have affections
which lead them to the conservation of civil order would recognize, even
in its cradle, the child as legitimate, which has been produced from
those principles of cogent expediency to which all just governments owe
their birth, and on which they justify their continuance. But they will
be late and reluctant in giving any sort of countenance to the
operations of a power which has derived its birth from no law and no
necessity, but which, on the contrary, has had its origin in those vices
and sinister practices by which the social union is often disturbed and
sometimes destroyed. This Assembly has hardly a year's prescription. We
have their own word for it that they have made a revolution. To make a
revolution is a measure which, _prima fronte_, requires an apology. To
make a revolution is to subvert the ancient state of our country; and no
common reasons are called for to justify so violent a proceeding. The
sense of mankind authorizes us to examine into the mode of acquiring new
power, and to criticize on the use that is made of it