st sort of legislators attended to the different
kinds of citizens, and combined them into one commonwealth, the others,
the metaphysical and alchemistical legislators, have taken the directly
contrary course. They have attempted to confound all sorts of citizens,
as well as they could, into one homogeneous mass; and then they divided
this their amalgama into a number of incoherent republics. They reduce
men to loose counters, merely for the sake of simple telling, and not to
figures, whose power is to arise from their place in the table. The
elements of their own metaphysics might have taught them better lessons.
The troll of their categorical table might have informed them that there
was something else in the intellectual world besides _substance_ and
_quantity_. They might learn from the catechism of metaphysics that
there were eight heads more,[123] in every complex deliberation, which
they have never thought of; though these, of all the ten, are the
subject on which the skill of man can operate anything at all.

So far from this able disposition of some of the old republican
legislators, which follows with a solicitous accuracy the moral
conditions and propensities of men, they have levelled and crushed
together all the orders which they found, even under the coarse,
unartificial arrangement of the monarchy, in which mode of government
the classing of the citizens is not of so much importance as in a
republic. It is true, however, that every such classification, if
properly ordered, is good in all forms of government, and composes a
strong barrier against the excesses of despotism, as well as it is the
necessary means of giving effect and permanence to a republic. For want
of something of this kind, if the present project of a republic should
fail, all securities to a moderated freedom fail along with it, all the
indirect restraints which mitigate despotism are removed; insomuch that,
if monarchy should ever again obtain an entire ascendency in France,
under this or any other dynasty, it will probably be, if not voluntarily
tempered, at setting out, by the wise and virtuous counsels of the
prince, the most completely arbitrary power that has ever appeared on
earth. This is to play a most desperate game.

The confusion which attends on all such proceedings they even declare to
be one of their objects, and they hope to secure their Constitution by a
terror of a return of those evils which attended their making it. "B