It adds new force to my observations:
and, indeed, M. de Calonne's work supplies my deficiencies by many new
and striking arguments on most of the subjects of this letter.[124]
It is this resolution to break their country into separate republics
which has driven them into the greatest number of their difficulties and
contradictions. If it were not for this, all the questions of exact
equality, and these balances, never to be settled, of individual rights,
population, and contribution, would be wholly useless. The
representation, though derived from parts, would be a duty which equally
regarded the whole. Each deputy to the Assembly would be the
representative of France, and of all its descriptions, of the many and
of the few, of the rich and of the poor, of the great districts and of
the small. All these districts would themselves be subordinate to some
standing authority, existing independently of them,--an authority in
which their representation, and everything that belongs to it,
originated, and to which it was pointed. This standing, unalterable,
fundamental government would make, and it is the only thing which could
make, that territory truly and properly a whole. With us, when we elect
popular representatives, we send them to a council in which each man
individually is a subject, and submitted to a government complete in all
its ordinary functions.
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