The British House of Commons, without shutting its doors to any merit
in any class, is, by the sure operation of adequate causes, filled
with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and in
acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval, and
politic distinction, that the country can afford. But supposing, what
hardly can be supposed as a case, that the House of Commons should be
composed in the same manner with the Tiers-Etat in France, would this
dominion of chicane be borne with patience, or even conceived without
horror? God forbid I should insinuate anything derogatory to that
profession, which is another priesthood, administering the rights of
sacred justice. But whilst I revere men in the functions which belong to
them, and would do as much as one man can do to prevent their exclusion
from any, I cannot, to flatter them, give the lie to nature. They are
good and useful in the composition; they must be mischievous if they
preponderate so as virtually to become the whole. Their very excellence
in their peculiar functions may be far from a qualification for others.
It cannot escape observation, that when men are too much confined
to professional and faculty habits, and as it were inveterate in the
recurrent employment of that narrow circle, they are rather disabled
than qualified for whatever depends on the knowledge of mankind, on
experience in mixed affairs, on a comprehensive, connected view of the
various, complicated, external, and internal interests, which go to the
formation of that multifarious thing called a state. After all, if
the House of Commons were to have a wholly professional and faculty
composition, what is the power of the House of Commons, circumscribed
and shut in by the immoveable barriers of law, usages, positive rules
of doctrine and practice, counterpoised by the House of Lords, and every
moment of its existence at the discretion of the crown to continue,
prorogue, or dissolve us? The power of the House of Commons, direct
or indirect, is indeed great; and long may it be able to preserve its
greatness, and the spirit belonging to true greatness, at the full; and
it will do so, as long as it can keep the breakers of law in India from
becoming the makers of law for England. The power, however, of the House
of Commons, when least diminished, is as a drop of water in the ocean,
compared to that residing in a settled majority of your National
Assembly. That assembly, since the destruction of the orders, has no
fundamental law, no strict convention, no respected usage to restrain
it. Instead of finding themselves obliged to conform to a fixed
constitution, they have a power to make a constitution which shall
conform to their designs. Nothing in heaven or upon earth can serve as
a control on them. What ought to be the heads, the hearts, the
dispositions, that are qualified, or that dare, not only to make laws
under a fixed constitution, but at one heat to strike out a totally new
constitution for a great kingdom, and every part of it, from the monarch
on the throne to the vestry of a parish? But--"fools rush in where
angels fear to tread." In such a state of unbounded power, for undefined
and indefinable purposes, the evil of a moral and almost physical
inaptitude of the man to the function, must be the greatest we can
conceive to happen in the management of human affairs.