They held for life. Indeed,
they may be said to have held by inheritance. Appointed by the monarch,
they were considered as nearly out of his power. The most determined
exertions of that authority against them only showed their radical
independence. They composed permanent bodies politic, constituted to
resist arbitrary innovation; and from that corporate constitution, and
from most of their forms, they were well calculated to afford both
certainty and stability to the laws. They had been a safe asylum to
secure these laws, in all the revolutions of humor and opinion. They had
saved that sacred deposit of the country during the reigns of arbitrary
princes and the struggles of arbitrary factions. They kept alive the
memory and record of the Constitution. They were the great security to
private property; which might be said (when personal liberty had no
existence) to be, in fact, as well guarded in France as in any other
country. Whatever is supreme in a state 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.
Pages:
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571