ally framed. My few remarks will be
such as regard its spirit, its tendency, and its fitness for framing a
popular commonwealth, which they profess theirs to be, suited to the
ends for which any commonwealth, and particularly such a commonwealth,
is made. At the same time I mean to consider its consistency with itself
and its own principles.

Old establishments are tried by their effects. If the people are happy,
united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to
be good from whence good is derived. In old establishments various
correctives have been found for their aberrations from theory. Indeed,
they are the results of various necessities and expediences. They are
not often constructed after any theory: theories are rather drawn from
them. In them we often see the end best obtained, where the means seem
not perfectly reconcilable to what we may fancy was the original scheme.
The means taught by experience may be better suited to political ends
than those contrived in the original project. They again react upon the
primitive constitution, and sometimes improve the design itself, from
which they seem to have departed. I think all this might be curiously
exemplified in the British Constitution. At worst, the errors and
deviations of every kind in reckoning are found and computed, and the
ship proceeds in her course. This is the case of old establishments; but
in a new and merely theoretic system, it is expected that every
contrivance shall appear, on the face of it, to answer its ends,
especially where the projectors are no way embarrassed with an endeavor
to accommodate the new building to an old one, either in the walls or on
the foundations.

The French builders, clearing away as mere rubbish whatever they found,
and, like their ornamental gardeners, forming everything into an exact
level, propose to rest the whole local and general legislature on three
bases of three different kinds,--one geometrical, one arithmetical, and
the third financial; the first of which they call _the basis of
territory_; the second, _the basis of population_; and the third, _the
basis of contribution_. For the accomplishment of the first of these
purposes, they divide the area of their country into eighty-three
pieces, regularly square, of eighteen leagues by eighteen. These large
divisions are called _Departments_. These they portion, proceeding by
square measurement, into seventeen hundred and twenty districts, call