of the Constituent Assembly, and of that conduct a most important portion is that now before us. But to proceed. I have already mentioned to you Rabaud de St. Etienne, a lawyer, a man of letters, a minister of the reformed religion, and a distinguished member of the Constituent Assembly. He is a specimen of a numerous description of men of the time; a friend to freedom and a virtuous man, but a convert to the new opinions, and an enthusiast in their favour. His story is shortly told: he supported these new opinions, but he supported order also, on every occasion; he voted against the death of the king: and for these crimes, or rather virtues, he was in the course of the year (1793) denounced, and at the end of it perished under the guillotine.

I shall now make some references to the accounts he gives. In the fourth book of his Précis of the Revolution, he observes, that at the period we are at present alluding to," France was like an immense chaos, in which all the elements of order subsisted, and waited but the hand of the Creator; every thing," says he," seemed to indicate that the kingdom would be a prey to anarchy;" and this was the great fear of the good, and the hope of all bad citizens, who thus looked for the renewal of the ancient despotism.

"But the men of property," he continues, "got armed, and this was the safety of France. France was covered with three millions of men clothed in the national uniform. It was the nation that protected the nation, and force was wisdom.

"The Assembly thus placed in security (this you see he admits), proceeded to the Declaration of Rights, and to lay down the principles of the monarchy, which they did, as they had been required to do by the people.

"When they came, however, to discuss the share which the king was to have in the legislation, then arose the great struggle in the bosom of the Assembly. There were those on the one side whom long established associations had prepared for a blind tenderness for the name and person of the king, the king, who, or whatever he was; who were for things as they found them; who thought the only legislator was the king; and in short, who hoped to regain by the king what they had lost by the people.

"On the other side there were those who were terrified,

who were rendered wild, at the very shadow and appearance of despotism, and who could conceive no safety for liberty but in the permanence of the legislative body-a body first making the laws and then presenting them to the sanction of the monarch. These two parties the president saw ranged on his right hand and on his left, and the same was the division through the whole of the kingdom."

Rabaud de St. Etienne then proceeds to the discussions that took place on the subject of the veto. These will be edifying to you, but still more so, those which related to the National Assembly itself.

You are never to suppose in political questions that much is not to be said on each side; it is for good sense to compare and decide.

"While the minds of men," says Rabaud," without doors got influenced on this subject of the veto, the Assembly proceeded to decide upon the permanence of its body, and the famous question of the two chambers. Before the meeting of the States General, the numerous partisans of the English constitution had declared their opinion. To this opinion great weight was given by the authority of Montesquieu, and the recent publication of De Lolme. But the advocates for the one chamber considered this equilibrium in the English constitution, but as a treaty of peace between three powers then existing; and however adapted to England this system of adjustment might be, France, they contended, was in no similar situation. Personal interests, however, mixed themselves in the discussion.

The high clergy were for the two chambers in the hope of obtaining a place in the upper; so was a great part of the nobility, but a division ensued: the noblesse of the provinces were for a representation of the whole order, the noblesse of the court wished to have the rights of the peerage conferred on them alone, and many of the nobility feared, that in some way or other, it would be contrived by the National Assembly that the high chamber should be composed only of the fortyseven that had first gone over to the Tiers Etat.

The curés, those that were not devoted to their bishops, were for the unity of the Assembly. The majority of the deputies saw in the upper house but a constitutional refuge

for aristocracy, and a preservative of the feudal system. Their distrust of it was but strengthened by the continuance, as they thought, of that triple league which existed between the two privileged orders and the court, and was again confirmed by the intrigues that were practised to prevent the king from giving his sanction to the decrees of the 4th of August. The result of all this was a sort of uncertainty and obscurity thrown over the measure of an upper house, and this diminished the number, at least the warmth of its partisans. No one could exactly see what the Assembly was to be, or what share he was to have in it; and in affairs of this kind, and in all politics, personal interests will necessarily find their way into the minds of men.

Nothing better, as it seemed, could be made of a senate for life, composed of citizens of all descriptions, for this might easily be corrupted by the court; nor of a senate taken from the whole of the Assembly for the time, and of which it would only be a fraction; and with respect to those who objected that no restraint could be imposed upon a single assembly, and no counterpoise contrived for it, it was answered, says Rabaud de St. Etienne (you will observe the answer), "that means enough could be found in the Assembly itself to stop its course by introducing delays into its proceedings; that a counterpoise would naturally be found in the veto of the king, which veto might be considered as representing the negative will of the nation, as the Assembly did the affirmative; that if they abused their power by making decrees contrary to the interests of the community, the king would find his merit with the community in saving them from the tyranny of the Assembly; that these two counter powers of the king and the Assembly were far better for the people than three, of which two would be naturally united against them. And so the Assembly," continues the historian, "decreed by a majority of nine hundred and eleven to eighty-nine voices, that there should be only one chamber;" and again," that the Assembly should be created afresh, by new elections every two years; and this term of two years be called a legislature.'

You see here the nature of the plausible but superficial and unfortunate reasonings of the more warm partisans of liberty at this time. Even so early as August, 1789, the king was ex

pected, without an army, without a power of dissolving the Assembly, and without a second house of any kind whatever, to oppose his veto to the representatives of the people, not indeed whenever, in his own judgment, their measures were wrong, the natural meaning of a veto, but when it was also clear that the people would be with him. And this was to be the situation of the executive power; and this was to be the king's chance for the necessary prerogatives of his station; and these his means of supporting his crown and dignity; and this the treatment of one of the great authorities in the state, already constituted, acknowledged, and existing, and hitherto considered as supreme.

Now I do not see a single remark of this kind in the historian, though he was writing, as he says in the preface, not in 1789, but some time after, when the constitution was made, and when the mistakes of it were already, one might have thought, sufficiently displayed.

We will now refer to the other history which I mentioned, the history of the Two Friends of Liberty: the state of the Assembly and of Paris, and the warning it holds out to all who love freedom, is still more distinctly seen in this history of the "Two Friends of Liberty." The whole subject of the constitution, as it appears from this work, was thoroughly discussed both within the Assembly and without; the nature of the rights of man, the veto, and the two chambers, all were made matter of the most lively contest and debate.

Of the rights of man three different systems were, it seems, offered to the Assembly; one by La Fayette, one by the Abbé de Sieyes, and one by Mounier. Each had, it was supposed, its merits and defects, of course. The Assembly referred them to a committee, who were to report and produce a new one: this was done, but in vain. In politics the incurable nature of human dissent should be taken always into the calculation by those who are criticising old systems, or are ready to propose new ones. Mirabeau, it appears, interfered with all his commanding powers, very reasonably proposing that the prefatory rights and the constitution, the theory and the application, the tree and the fruits of it, should be all seen hereafter, and all at one and the same time-in vain.

The more warm partisans of liberty insisted on the danger

of any delay; talked of pretexts, subterfuges, and chicanery; expressed their suspicions of Mirabeau himself and of the steadiness of his principles.

These are, I think, among the lessons of the Revolution, and are admitted by those historians who lived and wrote at the time. Men must love liberty, but, if possible, even in perilous times, should be conciliatory and ready to come to adjustments, and deeply aware of the controversial nature of independent minds.

The declaration was at last agreed upon, such as you see it. I must now digress for a moment, to make an observation on the general subject of these declarations, or rather to contrast the conduct of the statesmen of America with those

of France on this occasion. I have already pointed your thoughts in this direction; I must do it once more.

It is remarkable, then, even in the case of America, when in 1776 the people of the continent were to be worked up into resistance to Great Britain by Congress, and soon after by the state legislatures, that though the rights of man were then brought forward and drawn up in battle-array, and very naturally; yet when a general constitution was to be formed by the convention in 1787, eleven years after, some lessons had been received in the mean time by Washington and the best patriots of America, and, therefore, their preface is then simple and calm, and there is nothing said about rights of man and elementary principles. "We, the people," they say, "of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America." This is their language; and then (to use a common phrase) they immediately proceed to business. "All legislative power herein granted," they declare, "shall be vested in a Congress," &c. &c.; and the sensible men engaged in this work concluded it with saying, "the ratification of nine states shall be sufficient for the establishment of this constitution between the states so ratifying the same." The form of government which they chose was that of a republic, agreeably to the inherited and existing notions and manners