e one, sometimes the other, and always to betray themselves.
Such has been their situation; such must be the situation of those who
succeed them. I have much respect, and many good wishes, for M. Necker.
I am obliged to him for attentions. I thought, when his enemies had
driven him from Versailles, that his exile was a subject of most serious
congratulation. _Sed multae urbes et publica vota vicerunt_. He is now
sitting on the ruins of the finances and of the monarchy of France.

A great deal more might be observed on the strange constitution of the
executory part of the new government; but fatigue must give bounds to
the discussion of subjects which in themselves have hardly any limits.

As little genius and talent am I able to perceive in the plan of
judicature formed by the National Assembly. According to their
invariable course, the framers of your Constitution have begun with the
utter abolition of the parliaments. These venerable bodies, like the
rest of the old government, stood in need of reform, even though there
should be no change made in the monarchy. They required several more
alterations to adapt them to the system of a free Constitution. But
they had particulars in their constitution, and those not a few, which
deserved approbation from the wise. They possessed one fundamental
excellence: they were independent. The most doubtful circumstance
attendant on their office, that of its being vendible, contributed,
however, to this independency of character. They held for life. Indeed,
they may be said to have held by inheritance. Appointed by the monarch,
they were considered as nearly out of his power. The most determined
exertions of that authority against them only showed their radical
independence. They composed permanent bodies politic, constituted to
resist arbitrary innovation; and from that corporate constitution, and
from most of their forms, they were well calculated to afford both
certainty and stability to the laws. They had been a safe asylum to
secure these laws, in all the revolutions of humor and opinion. They had
saved that sacred deposit of the country during the reigns of arbitrary
princes and the struggles of arbitrary factions. They kept alive the
memory and record of the Constitution. They were the great security to
private property; which might be said (when personal liberty had no
existence) to be, in fact, as well guarded in France as in any other
country. Whatever is supreme in a state