It would have been prudent, along with the parliaments, to preserve their antient power of registering, and of remonstrating at least, upon all the decrees of the national assembly, as they did upon those which passed in the time of the mo|narchy. It would be a means of squaring the oc|casional decrees of a democracy to some principles of general jurisprudence. The ruin of the antient democracies was, that they ruled, as you do, by oc|casional decrees, psephismata. This practice soon broke in upon the tenour and consistency of the laws; they abated the respect of the people towards them; and totally destroyed them in the end.
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 execu|tion; 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 obe|dience. As you have changed all things, you have invented new principles of order. You first appoint judges, who, I suppose, are to determine ac|cording 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 stu|dies
