Your vesting the power of remonstrance, which, in the time of the
monarchy, existed in the Parliament of Paris, in your principal
executive officer, whom, in spite of common sense, you persevere in
calling king, is the height of absurdity. You ought never to suffer
remonstrance from him who is to execute. This is to understand neither
council nor execution, neither authority nor obedience. The person whom
you call king ought not to have this power, or he ought to have more.
Your present arrangement is strictly judicial. Instead of imitating your
monarchy, and seating your judges on a bench of independence, your
object is to reduce them to the most blind obedience. As you have
changed all things, you have invented new principles of order. You first
appoint judges, who, I suppose, are to determine according to law, and
then you let them know, that, at some time or other, you intend to give
them some law by which they are to determine. Any studies which they
have made (if any they have made) are to be useless to them. But to
supply these studies, they are to be sworn to obey all the rules,
orders, and instructions which from time to time they are to receive
from the National Assembly. These if they submit to, they leave no
ground of law to the subject. They become complete and most dangerous
instruments in the hands of the governing power, which, in the midst of
a cause, or on the prospect of it, may wholly change the rule of
decision.
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