ting
the risk. There is no other way of keeping the several potentates of
Europe from intriguing distinctly and personally with the members of
your Assembly, from intermeddling in all your concerns, and fomenting,
in the heart of your country, the most pernicious of all
factions,--factions in the interest and under the direction of foreign
powers. From that worst of evils, thank God, we are still free. Your
skill, if you had any, would be well employed to find out indirect
correctives and controls upon this perilous trust. If you did not like
those which in England we have chosen, your leaders might have exerted
their abilities in contriving better. If it were necessary to exemplify
the consequences of such an executive government as yours, in the
management of great affairs, I should refer you to the late reports of
M. de Montmorin to the National Assembly, and all the other proceedings
relative to the differences between Great Britain and Spain. It would be
treating your understanding with disrespect to point them out to you.

I hear that the persons who are called ministers have signified an
intention of resigning their places. I am rather astonished that they
have not resigned long since. For the universe I would not have stood in
the situation in which they have been for this last twelvemonth. They
wished well, I take it for granted, to the Revolution. Let this fact be
as it may, they could not, placed as they were upon an eminence, though
an eminence of humiliation, but be the first to see collectively, and to
feel each in his own department, the evils which have been produced by
that Revolution. In every step which they took, or forbore to take, they
must have felt the degraded situation of their country, and their utter
incapacity of serving it. They are in a species of subordinate servitude
in which no men before them were ever seen. Without confidence from
their sovereign on whom they were forced, or from the Assembly who
forced them upon him, all the noble functions of their office are
executed by committees of the Assembly, without any regard whatsoever to
their personal or their official authority. They are to execute, without
power; they are to be responsible, without discretion; they are to
deliberate, without choice. In their puzzled situation, under two
sovereigns, over neither of whom they have any influence, they must act
in such a manner as (in effect, whatever they may intend) sometimes to
betray th