principle of representation according to contribution, that is according
to riches, to be well imagined, and to be a necessary basis for their
republic. In this their third basis they assume that riches ought to be
respected, and that justice and policy require that they should entitle
men, in some mode or other, to a larger share in the administration of
public affairs; it is now to be seen how the Assembly provides for the
preëminence, or even for the security of the rich, by conferring, in
virtue of their opulence, that larger measure of power to their district
which is denied to them personally. I readily admit (indeed, I should
lay it down as a fundamental principle) that in a republican government,
which has a democratic basis, the rich do require an additional security
above what is necessary to them in monarchies. They are subject to envy,
and through envy to oppression. On the present scheme it is impossible
to divine what advantage they derive from the aristocratic preference
upon which the unequal representation of the masses is founded. The rich
cannot feel it, either as a support to dignity or as security to
fortune: for the aristocratic mass is generated from purely democratic
principles; and the prevalence given to it in the general representation
has no sort of reference to or connection with the persons upon account
of whose property this superiority of the mass is established. If the
contrivers of this scheme meant any sort of favor to the rich, in
consequence of their contribution, they ought to have conferred the
privilege either on the individual rich, or on some class formed of rich
persons (as historians represent Servius Tullius to have done in the
early constitution of Rome); because the contest between the rich and
the poor is not a struggle between corporation and corporation, but a
contest between men and men,--a competition, not between districts, but
between descriptions. It would answer its purpose better, if the scheme
were inverted: that the votes of the masses were rendered equal, and
that the votes within each mass were proportioned to property.
Let us suppose one man in a district (it is an easy supposition) to
contribute as much as a hundred of his neighbors. Against these he has
but one vote. If there were but one representative for the mass, his
poor neighbors would outvote him by an hundred to one for that single
representative. Bad enough! But amends are to be made him. How? The
district, in virtue of his wealth, is to choose, say ten members instead
of one: that is to say, by paying a very large contribution he has the
happiness of being outvoted, an hundred to one, by the poor, for ten
representatives, instead of being outvoted exactly in the same
proportion for a single member. In truth, instead of benefiting by this
superior quantity of representation, the rich man is subjected to an
additional hardship. The increase of representation within his province
sets up nine persons more, and as many more than nine as there may be
democratic candidates, to cabal and intrigue and to flatter the people
at his expense and to his oppression. An interest is by this means held
out to multitudes of the inferior sort, in obtaining a salary of
eighteen livres a day, (to them a vast object,) besides the pleasure of
a residence in Paris, and their share in the government of the kingdom.
The more the objects of ambition are multiplied and become democratic,
just in that proportion the rich are endangered.
Thus it must fare between the poor and the rich in the province deemed
aristocratic, which in its internal relation is the very reverse of that
character. In its external relation, that is, in its relation to the
other provinces, I cannot see how the unequal representation which is
given to masses on account of wealth becomes the means of preserving the
equipoise and the tranquillity of the commonwealth. For, if it be one of
the objects to secure the weak from being crushed by the strong, (as in
all society undoubtedly it is,) how are the smaller and poorer of these
masses to be saved from the tyranny of the more wealthy? Is it by adding
to the wealthy further and more systematical means of oppressing them?
When we come to a balance of representation between corporate bodies,
provincial interests, emulations, and jealousies are full as likely to
arise among them as among individuals; and their divisions are likely to
produce a much hotter spirit of dissension, and something leading much
more nearly to a war.
I see that these aristocratic masses are made upon what is called the
principle of direct contribution. Nothing can be a more unequal standard
than this. The indirect contribution, that which arises from duties on
consumption, is in truth a better standard, and follows and discovers
wealth more naturally than this of direct contribution. It is difficult,
indeed, to fix a standard of local preference on account of the one, or
of the other, or of both, because some provinces may pay the more of
either or of both on account of causes not intrinsic, but originating
from those very districts over whom they have obtained a preference in
consequence of their ostensible contribution. If the masses were
independent, sovereign bodies, who were to provide for a federative
treasury by distinct contingents, and that the revenue had not (as it
has) many impositions running through the whole, which affect men
individually, and not corporately, and which, by their nature, confound
all territorial limits, something might be said for the basis of
contribution as founded on masses. But, of all things, this
representation, to be measured by contribution, is the most difficult to
settle upon principles of equity in a country which considers its
districts as members of a whole. For a great city, such as Bordeaux or
Paris, appears to pay a vast body of duties, almost out of all
assignable proportion to other places, and its mass is considered
accordingly. But are these cities the true contributors in that
proportion? No. The consumers of the commodities imported into Bordeaux,
who are scattered through all France, pay the import duties of Bordeaux.
The produce of the vintage in Guienne and Languedoc give to that city
the means of its contribution growing out of an export commerce. The
landholders who spend their estates in Paris, and are thereby the
creators of that city, contribute for Paris from the provinces out of
which their revenues arise. Very nearly the same arguments will apply to
the representative share given on account of _direct_ contribution:
because the direct contribution must be assessed on wealth, real or
presumed; and that local wealth will itself arise from causes not local,
and which therefore in equity ought not to produce a local preference.
It is very remarkable, that, in this fundamental regulation which
settles the representation of the mass upon the direct contribution,
they have not yet settled how that direct contribution shall be laid,
and how apportioned. Perhaps there is some latent policy towards the
continuance of the present Assembly in this strange procedure. However,
until they do this, they can have no certain constitution. It must
depend at last upon the system of taxation, and must vary with every
variation in that system. As they have contrived matters, their taxation
does not so much depend on their constitution as their constitution on
their taxation. This must introduce great confusion among the masses; as
the variable qualification for votes within the district must, if ever
real contested elections take place, cause infinite internal
controversies.
To compare together the three bases, not on their political reason, but
on the ideas on which the Assembly works, and to try its consistency
with itself, we cannot avoid observing that the principle which the
committee call the basis of _population_ does not begin to operate from
the same point with the two other principles, called the bases of
_territory_ and of _contribution_, which are both of an aristocratic
nature. The consequence is, that, where all three begin to operate
together, there is the most absurd inequality produced by the operation
of the former on the two latter principles. Every canton contains four
square leagues, and is estimated to contain, on the average, 4,000
inhabitants, or 680 voters in the _primary assemblies_, which vary in
numbers with the population of the canton, and send _one deputy_ to the
_commune_ for every 200 voters. _Nine cantons_ make a _commune_.
Now let us take _a canton_ containing _a seaport town of trade_, or _a
great manufacturing town_. Let us suppose the population of this canton
to be 12,700 inhabitants, or 2,193 voters, forming _three primary
assemblies_, and sending _ten deputies_ to the _commune_.
Oppose to this _one_ canton _two_ others of the remaining eight in the
same commune. These we may suppose to have their fair population, of
4,000 inhabitants, and 680 voters each, or 8,000 inhabitants and 1,360
voters, both together. These will form only _two primary assemblies_,
and send only _six_ deputies to the _commune_.
When the assembly of the _commune_ comes to vote on the _basis of
territory_, which principle is first admitted to operate in that
assembly, the _single canton_, which has _half_ the territory of the
_other two_, will have _ten_ voices to _six_ in the election of _three
deputies_ to the assembly of the department, chosen on the express
ground of a representation of territory. This inequality, striking as it
is, will be yet highly aggravated, if we suppose, as we fairly may, the
_several_ other cantons of the _commune_ to fall proportionally short of
the average population, as much as the _principal canton_ exceeds it.
Now as to _the basis of contribution_, which also is a principle
admitted first to operate in the assembly of the _commune_. Let us again
take _one_ canton, such as is stated above. If the whole of the direct
contributions paid by a great trading or manufacturing town be divided
equally among the inhabitants, each individual will be found to pay much
more than an individual living in the country according to the same
average. The whole paid by the inhabitants of the former will be more
than the whole paid by the inhabitants of the latter,--we may fairly
assume one third more. Then the 12,700 inhabitants, or 2,193 voters of
the canton, will pay as much as 19,050 inhabitants, or 3,289 voters of
the _other cantons_, which are nearly the estimated proportion of
inhabitants and voters of _five_ other cantons. Now the 2,193 voters
will, as I before said, send only _ten_ deputies to the assembly; the
3,289 voters will send _sixteen_. Thus, for an _equal_ share in the
contribution of the whole _commune_, there will be a difference of
_sixteen_ voices to _ten_ in voting for deputies to be chosen on the
principle of representing the general contribution of the whole
_commune_.
By the same mode of computation, we shall find 15,875 inhabitants, or
2,741 voters of the _other_ cantons, who pay _one sixth_ LESS to the
contribution of the whole _commune_, will have _three_ voices MORE than
the 12,700 inhabitants, or 2,193 voters of the _one_ canton.
Such is the fantastical and unjust inequality between mass and mass, in
this curious repartition of the rights of representation arising out of
_territory_ and _contribution_. The qualifications which these confer
are in truth negative qualifications, that give a right in an inverse
proportion to the possession of them.
In this whole contrivance of the three bases, consider it in any light
you please, I do not see a variety of objects reconciled in one
consistent whole, but several contradictory principles reluctantly and
irreconcilably brought and held together by your philosophers, like wild
beasts shut up in a cage, to claw and bite each other to their mutual
destruction.
I am afraid I have gone too far into their way of considering the
formation of a Constitution. They have much, but bad,
metaphysics,--much, but bad, geometry,--much, but false, proportionate
arithmetic; but if it were all as exact as metaphysics, geometry, and
arithmetic ought to be, and if their schemes were perfectly consistent
in all their parts, it would make only a more fair and sightly vision.
It is remarkable, that, in a great arrangement of mankind, not one
reference whatsoever is to be found to anything moral or anything
politic,--nothing that relates to the concerns, the actions, the
passions, the interests of men. _Hominem non sapiunt_.
You see I only consider this Constitution as electoral, and leading by
steps to the National Assembly. I do not enter into the internal
government of the departments, and their genealogy through the communes
and cantons. These local governments are, in the original plan, to be as
nearly as possible composed in the same manner and on the same
principles with the elective assemblies. They are each of them bodies
perfectly compact and rounded in themselves.
You cannot but perceive in this scheme, that it has a direct and
immediate tendency to sever France into a variety of republics, and to
render them totally independent of each other, without any direct
constitutional means of coherence, connection, or subordination, except
what may be derived from their acquiescence in the determinations of the
general congress of the ambassadors from each independent republic. Such
in reality is the National Assembly; and such governments, I admit, do
exist in the world, though, in forms infinitely more suitable to the
local and habitual circumstances of their people. But such associations,
rather than bodies politic, have generally been the effect of necessity,
not choice; and I believe the present French power is the very first
body of citizens who, having obtained full authority to do with their
country what they pleased, have chosen to dissever it in this barbarous
manner.
It is impossible not to observe, that, in the spirit of this geometrical
distribution and arithmetical arrangement, these pretended citizens
treat France exactly like a country of conquest. Acting as conquerors,
they have imitated the policy of the harshest of that harsh race. The
policy of such barbarous victors, who contemn a subdued people, and
insult their feelings, has ever been, as much as in them lay, to destroy
all vestiges of the ancient country, in religion, in polity, in laws,
and in manners; to confound all territorial limits; to produce a general
poverty; to put up their properties to auction; to crush their princes,
nobles, and pontiffs; to lay low everything which had lifted its head
above the level, or which could serve to combine or rally, in their
distresses, the disbanded people, under the standard of old opinion.
They have made France free in the manner in which those sincere friends
to the rights of mankind, the Romans, freed Greece, Macedon, and other
nations. They destroyed the bonds of their union, under color of
providing for the independence of each of their cities.
When the members who compose these new bodies of cantons, communes, and
departments, arrangements purposely produced through the medium of
confusion, begin to act, they will find themselves in a great measure
strangers to one another. The electors and elected throughout,
especially in the rural _cantons_, will be frequently without any civil
habitudes or connections, or any of that natural discipline which is the
soul of a true republic. Magistrates and collectors of revenue are now
no longer acquainted with their districts, bishops with their dioceses,
or curates with their parishes. These new colonies of the rights of men
bear a strong resemblance to that sort of military colonies which
Tacitus has observed upon in the declining policy of Rome. In better and
wiser days (whatever course they took with foreign nations) they were
careful to make the elements of a methodical subordination and
settlement to be coeval, and even to lay the foundations of discipline
in the military.[122] But when all the good arts had fallen into ruin,
they proceeded, as your Assembly does, upon the equality of men, and
with as little judgment, and as little care for those things which make
a republic tolerable or durable. But in this, as well as almost every
instance, your new commonwealth is born and bred and fed in those
corruptions which mark degenerated and worn-out republics. Your child
comes into the world with the symptoms of death; the _facies
Hippocratica_ forms the character of its physiognomy and the prognostic
of its fate.
The legislators who framed the ancient republics knew that their
business was too arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus
than the metaphysics of an undergraduate and the mathematics and
arithmetic of an exciseman. They had to do with men, and they were
obliged to study human nature. They had to do with citizens, and they
were obliged to study the effects of those habits which are
communicated by the circumstances of civil life. They were sensible
that the operation of this second nature on the first produced a new
combination,--and thence arose many diversities amongst men, according
to their birth, their education, their professions, the periods of their
lives, their residence in towns or in the country, their several ways of
acquiring and of fixing property, and according to the quality of the
property itself, all which rendered them, as it were, so many different
species of animals. From hence they thought themselves obliged to
dispose their citizens into such classes, and to place them in such
situations in the state, as their peculiar habits might qualify them to
fill, and to allot to them such appropriated privileges as might secure
to them what their specific occasions required, and which might furnish
to each description such force as might protect it in the conflict
caused by the diversity of interests that must exist, and must contend,
in all complex society: for the legislator would have been ashamed that
the coarse husbandman should well know how to assort and to use his
sheep, horses, and oxen, and should have enough of common sense not to
abstract and equalize them all into animals, without providing for each
kind an appropriate food, care, and employment,--whilst he, the
economist, disposer, and shepherd of his own kindred, subliming himself
into an airy metaphysician, was resolved to know nothing of his flocks
but as men in general. It is for this reason that Montesquieu observed,
very justly, that, in their classification of the citizens, the great
legislators of antiquity made the greatest display of their powers, and
even soared above themselves. It is here that your modern legislators
have gone deep into the negative series, and sunk even below their own
nothing. As the first sort of legislators attended to the different
kinds of citizens, and combined them into one commonwealth, the others,
the metaphysical and alchemistical legislators, have taken the directly
contrary course. They have attempted to confound all sorts of citizens,
as well as they could, into one homogeneous mass; and then they divided
this their amalgama into a number of incoherent republics. They reduce
men to loose counters, merely for the sake of simple telling, and not to
figures, whose power is to arise from their place in the table. The
elements of their own metaphysics might have taught them better lessons.
The troll of their categorical table might have informed them that there
was something else in the intellectual world besides _substance_ and
_quantity_. They might learn from the catechism of metaphysics that
there were eight heads more,[123] in every complex deliberation, which
they have never thought of; though these, of all the ten, are the
subject on which the skill of man can operate anything at all.
So far from this able disposition of some of the old republican
legislators, which follows with a solicitous accuracy the moral
conditions and propensities of men, they have levelled and crushed
together all the orders which they found, even under the coarse,
unartificial arrangement of the monarchy, in which mode of government
the classing of the citizens is not of so much importance as in a
republic. It is true, however, that every such classification, if
properly ordered, is good in all forms of government, and composes a
strong barrier against the excesses of despotism, as well as it is the
necessary means of giving effect and permanence to a republic. For want
of something of this kind, if the present project of a republic should
fail, all securities to a moderated freedom fail along with it, all the
indirect restraints which mitigate despotism are removed; insomuch that,
if monarchy should ever again obtain an entire ascendency in France,
under this or any other dynasty, it will probably be, if not voluntarily
tempered, at setting out, by the wise and virtuous counsels of the
prince, the most completely arbitrary power that has ever appeared on
earth. This is to play a most desperate game.
The confusion which attends on all such proceedings they even declare to
be one of their objects, and they hope to secure their Constitution by a
terror of a return of those evils which attended their making it. "By
this," say they, "its destruction will become difficult to authority,
which cannot break it up without the entire disorganization of the whole
state." They presume, that, if this authority should ever come to the
same degree of power that they have acquired, it would make a more
moderate and chastised use of it, and would piously tremble entirely to
disorganize the state in the savage manner that they have done. They
expect from the virtues of returning despotism the security which is to
be enjoyed by the offspring of their popular vices.
I wish, Sir, that you and my readers would give an attentive perusal to
the work of M. de Calonne on this subject. It is, indeed, not only an
eloquent, but an able and instructive performance. I confine myself to
what he says relative to the Constitution of the new state, and to the
condition of the revenue. As to the disputes of this minister with his
rivals, I do not wish to pronounce upon them. As little do I mean to
hazard any opinion concerning his ways and means, financial or
political, for taking his country out of its present disgraceful and
deplorable situation of servitude, anarchy, bankruptcy, and beggary. I
cannot speculate quite so sanguinely as he does: but he is a Frenchman,
and has a closer duty relative to those objects, and better means of
judging of them, than I can have. I wish that the formal avowal which he
refers to, made by one of the principal leaders in the Assembly,
concerning the tendency of their scheme to bring France not only from a
monarchy to a republic, but from a republic to a mere confederacy, may
be very particularly attended to. 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. With you the elective Assembly is the sovereign,
and the sole sovereign; all the members are therefore integral parts of
this sole sovereignty. But with us it is totally different. With us the
representative, separated from the other parts, can have no action and
no existence. The government is the point of reference of the several
members and districts of our representation. This is the centre of our
unity. This government of reference is a trustee for the _whole_, and
not for the parts. So is the other branch of our public council: I mean
the House of Lords. With us the King and the Lords are several and joint
securities for the equality of each district, each province, each city.
When did you hear in Great Britain of any province suffering from the
inequality of its representation? what district from having no
representation at all? Not only our monarchy and our peerage secure the
equality on which our unity depends, but it is the spirit of the House
of Commons itself. The very inequality of representation, which is so
foolishly complained of, is perhaps the very thing which prevents us
from thinking or acting as members for districts. Cornwall elects as
many members as all Scotland. But is Cornwall better taken care of than
Scotland? Few trouble their heads about any of your bases, out of some
giddy clubs. Most of those who wish for any change, upon any plausible
grounds, desire it on different ideas.