d foul, and they must go into
dock to be refitted. Every man who has served in an Assembly is
ineligible for two years after. Just as these magistrates begin to learn
their trade, like chimney-sweepers, they are disqualified for exercising
it. Superficial, new, petulant acquisition, and interrupted, dronish,
broken, ill recollection, is to be the destined character of all your
future governors. Your Constitution has too much of jealousy to have
much of sense in it. You consider the breach of trust in the
representative so principally that you do not at all regard the question
of his fitness to execute it.

This purgatory interval is not unfavorable to a faithless
representative, who may be as good a canvasser as he was a bad governor.
In this time he may cabal himself into a superiority over the wisest and
most virtuous. As, in the end, all the members of this elective
Constitution are equally fugitive, and exist only for the election, they
may be no longer the same persons who had chosen him, to whom he is to
be responsible when he solicits for a renewal of his trust. To call all
the secondary electors of the _commune_ to account is ridiculous,
impracticable, and unjust: they may themselves have been deceived in
their choice, as the third set of electors, those of the _department_,
may be in theirs. In your elections responsibility cannot exist.

Finding no sort of principle of coherence with each other in the nature
and constitution of the several new republics of France, I considered
what cement the legislators had provided for them from any extraneous
materials. Their confederations, their _spectacles_, their civic feasts,
and their enthusiasm I take no notice of; they are nothing but mere
tricks; but tracing their policy through their actions, I think I can
distinguish the arrangements by which they propose to hold these
republics together. The first is the _confiscation_, with the compulsory
paper currency annexed to it; the second is the supreme power of the
city of Paris; the third is the general army of the state. Of this last
I shall reserve what I have to say, until I come to consider the army
as an head by itself.

As to the operation of the first (the confiscation and paper currency)
merely as a cement, I cannot deny that these, the one depending on the
other, may for some time compose some sort of cement, if their madness
and folly in the management, and in the tempering of the parts together,
does not