le, that their subverted government was as
incapable as the present certainly is of all improvement and
correction. How dare they to say so who have never made that experiment?
They are experimenters by their trade. They have made an hundred others,
infinitely more hazardous.

The English admirers of the forty-eight thousand republics which form
the French federation praise them not for what they are, but for what
they are to become. They do not talk as politicians, but as prophets.
But in whatever character they choose to found panegyric on prediction,
it will be thought a little singular to praise any work, not for its own
merits, but for the merits of something else which may succeed to it.
When any political institution is praised, in spite of great and
prominent faults of every kind, and in all its parts, it must be
supposed to have something excellent in its fundamental principles. It
must be shown that it is right, though imperfect,--that it is not only
by possibility susceptible of improvement, but that it contains in it a
principle tending to its melioration.

Before they attempt to show this progression of their favorite work from
absolute pravity to finished perfection, they will find themselves
engaged in a civil war with those whose cause they maintain. What! alter
our sublime Constitution, the glory of France, the envy of the world,
the pattern for mankind, the masterpiece of legislation, the collected
and concentrated glory of this enlightened age? Have we not produced it
ready-made and ready-armed, mature in its birth, a perfect goddess of
wisdom and of war, hammered by our blacksmith midwives out of the brain
of Jupiter himself? Have we not sworn our devout, profane, believing,
infidel people to an allegiance to this goddess, even before she had
burst the _dura mater_, and as yet existed only in embryo? Have we not
solemnly declared this Constitution unalterable by any future
legislature? Have we not bound it on posterity forever, though our
abettors have declared that no one generation is competent to bind
another? Have we not obliged the members of every future Assembly to
qualify themselves for their seats by swearing to its conservation?

Indeed, the French Constitution always must be (if a change is not made
in all their principles and fundamental arrangements) a government
wholly by popular representation. It must be this or nothing. The French
faction considers as an usurpation, as an atrocious