olution that no
two of their republics shall have the same commander-in-chief.

To a person who takes a view of the whole, the strength of Paris, thus
formed, will appear a system of general weakness. It is boasted that the
geometrical policy has been adopted, that all local ideas should be
sunk, and that the people should be no longer Gascons, Picards, Bretons,
Normans,--but Frenchmen, with one country, one heart, and one Assembly.
But, instead of being all Frenchmen, the greater likelihood is that the
inhabitants of that region will shortly have no country. No man ever was
attached by a sense of pride, partiality, or real affection, to a
description of square measurement. He never will glory in belonging to
the chequer No. 71, or to any other badge-ticket. We begin our public
affections in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen. We
pass on to our neighborhoods, and our habitual provincial connections.
These are inns and resting-places. Such divisions of our country as have
been formed by habit, and not by a sudden jerk of authority, were so
many little images of the great country, in which the heart found
something which it could fill. The love to the whole is not extinguished
by this subordinate partiality. Perhaps it is a sort of elemental
training to those higher and more large regards by which alone men come
to be affected, as with their own concern, in the prosperity of a
kingdom so extensive as that of France. In that general territory
itself, as in the old name of Provinces, the citizens are interested
from old prejudices and unreasoned habits, and not on account of the
geometric properties of its figure. The power and preeminence of Paris
does certainly press down and hold these republics together as long as
it lasts: but, for the reasons I have already given you, I think it can
not last very long.

Passing from the civil creating and the civil cementing principles of
this Constitution to the National Assembly, which is to appear and act
as sovereign, we see a body in its constitution with every possible
power and no possible external control. We see a body without
fundamental laws, without established maxims, without respected rules of
proceeding, which nothing can keep firm to any system whatsoever. Their
idea of their powers is always taken at the utmost stretch of
legislative competency, and their examples for common cases from the
exceptions of the most urgent necessity. The future is to be