ought to have, as much as
possible, ifs judicial authority so constituted as not only not to
depend upon it, but in some sort to balance it. It ought to give a
security to its justice against its power. It ought to make its
judicature, as it were, something exterior to the state.

Those parliaments had furnished, not the best certainly, but some
considerable corrective to the excesses and vices of the monarchy. Such
an independent judicature was ten times more necessary when a democracy
became the absolute power of the country. In that Constitution,
elective, temporary, local judges, such as you have contrived,
exercising their dependent functions in a narrow society, must be the
worst of all tribunals. In them it will be vain to look for any
appearance of justice towards strangers, towards the obnoxious rich,
towards the minority of routed parties, towards all those who in the
election have supported unsuccessful candidates. It will be impossible
to keep the new tribunals clear of the worst spirit of faction. All
contrivances by ballot we know experimentally to be vain and childish to
prevent a discovery of inclinations. Where they may the best answer the
purposes of concealment, they answer to produce suspicion, and this is a
still more mischievous cause of partiality.

If the parliaments had been preserved, instead of being dissolved at so
ruinous a change to the nation, they might have served in this new
commonwealth, perhaps not precisely the same, (I do not mean an exact
parallel,) but near the same purposes as the court and senate of
Areopagus did in Athens: that is, as one of the balances and correctives
to the evils of a light and unjust democracy. Every one knows that this
tribunal was the great stay of that state; every one knows with what
care it was upheld, and with what a religious awe it was consecrated.
The parliaments were not wholly free from faction, I admit; but this
evil was exterior and accidental, and not so much the vice of their
constitution itself as it must be in your new contrivance of sexennial
elective judicatories. Several English commend the abolition of the old
tribunals, as supposing that they determined everything by bribery and
corruption. But they have stood the test of monarchic and republican
scrutiny. The court was well disposed to prove corruption on those
bodies, when they were dissolved in 1771; those who have again dissolved
them would have done the same, if they could; but