but the French republic
can stand without any assistance from that description of men, which, as
things are now circumstanced, rather stands in need of assistance itself
from the power which alone substantially exists in France: I mean the
several districts and municipal republics, and the several clubs which
direct all their affairs and appoint all their magistrates. This is the
power now paramount to everything, even to the Assembly itself called
National and that to which tribunals, priesthood, laws, finances, and
both descriptions of military power are wholly subservient, so far as
the military power of either description yields obedience to any name of
authority.

The world of contingency and political combination is much larger than
we are apt to imagine. We never can say what may or may not happen,
without a view to all the actual circumstances. Experience, upon other
data than those, is of all things the most delusive. Prudence in new
cases can do nothing on grounds of retrospect. A constant vigilance and
attention to the train of things as they successively emerge, and to act
on what they direct, are the only sure courses. The physician that let
blood, and by blood-letting cured one kind of plague, in the next added
to its ravages. That power goes with property is not universally true,
and the idea that the operation of it is certain and invariable may
mislead us very fatally.

[Sidenote: Power separated from property.]

Whoever will take an accurate view of the state of those republics, and
of the composition of the present Assembly deputed by them, (in which
Assembly there are not quite fifty persons possessed of an income
amounting to 100_l._ sterling yearly,) must discern clearly, _that the
political and civil power of France is wholly separated from its
property of every description_, and of course that neither the landed
nor the moneyed interest possesses the smallest weight or consideration
in the direction of any public concern. The whole kingdom is directed by
_the refuse of its chicane_, with the aid of the bustling, presumptuous
young clerks of counting-houses and shops, and some intermixture of
young gentlemen of the same character in the several towns. The rich
peasants are bribed with Church lands; and the poorer of that
description are, and can be, counted for nothing. They may rise in
ferocious, ill-directed tumults,--but they can only disgrace themselves
and signalize the triumph of their a