The power,
however, of the House of Commons, when least diminished, is as a drop of
water in the ocean, compared to that residing in a settled majority of
your National Assembly. That assembly, since the destruction of the
orders, has no fundamental law, no strict convention, no respected usage
to restrain it. Instead of finding themselves obliged to conform to a
fixed constitution, they have a power to make a constitution which shall
conform to their designs. Nothing in heaven or upon earth can serve as a
control on them. What ought to be the heads, the hearts, the
dispositions, that are qualified, or that dare, not only to make laws
under a fixed constitution, but at one heat to strike out a totally new
constitution for a great kingdom, and in every part of it, from the
monarch on the throne to the vestry of a parish? But
"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."
In such a state of unbounded power, for undefined and undefinable
purposes, the evil of a moral and almost physical inaptitude of the man
to the function must be the greatest we can conceive to happen in the
management of human affairs.
Having considered the composition of the third estate, as it stood in
its original frame, I took a view of the representatives of the clergy.
There, too, it appeared that full as little regard was had to the
general security of property, or to the aptitude of the deputies for
their public purposes, in the principles of their election.
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