Your new Constitution is the very reverse of ours in its principle; and
I am astonished how any persons could dream of holding out anything done
in it as an example for Great Britain. With you there is little, or
rather no, connection between the last representative and the first
constituent. The member who goes to the National Assembly is not chosen
by the people, nor accountable to them. There are three elections before
he is chosen; two sets of magistracy intervene between him and the
primary assembly, so as to render him, as I have said, an ambassador of
a state, and not the representative of the people within a state. By
this the whole spirit of the election is changed; nor can any corrective
your Constitution-mongers have devised render him anything else than
what he is. The very attempt to do it would inevitably introduce a
confusion, if possible, more horrid than the present. There is no way to
make a connection between the original constituent and the
representative, but by the circuitous means which may lead the candidate
to apply in the first instance to the primary electors, in order that by
their authoritative instructions (and something more perhaps) these
primary electors may force the two succeeding bodies of electors to make
a choice agreeable to their wishes. But this would plainly subvert the
whole scheme. It would be to plunge them back into that tumult and
confusion of popular election, which, by their interposed gradation of
elections, they mean to avoid, and at length to risk the whole fortune
of the state with those who have the least knowledge of it and the
least interest in it.
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