who
believe that the King and the Executive Power are only one and the same
thing: readers of _La Feuille Villageoise_ are more advanced.(*)

* See No. 50.--_Author_

Others use this bad reasoning: "Were there no hereditary chief there
would be an elective chief: the citizens would side with this man or
that, and there would be a civil war at every election." In the first
place, it is certain that hereditary succession alone has produced
the civil wars of France and England; and that beyond this are the
pre-tended rights, of royal families which have twenty times drawn on
these nations the scourge of foreign wars. It is, in fine, the heredity
of crowns that has caused the troubles of Regency, which Thomas Paine
calls Monarchy at nurse.

But above all it must be said, that if there be an elective chief, that
chief will not be a king surrounded by courtiers, burdened with pomp,
inflated by idolatries, and endowed with thirty millions of money; also,
that no citizen will be tempted to injure himself by placing another
citizen, his equal, for some years in an office without limited income
and circumscribed power.

In a word, whoever demands a king demands an aristocracy, and thirty
millions of taxes. See why Franklin described Royalism as _a crime like
poisoning_.

Royalty, its fanatical eclat, its superstitious idolatry, the delusive
assumption of its necessity, all these fictions have been invented only
to obtain from men excessive taxes and voluntary servitude. Royalty
and Popery have had the same aim, have sustained themselves by the same
artifices, and crumble under the same Light.

XII. TO THE ATTORNEY GENERAL, ON THE PROSECUTION AGAINST THE SECOND PART
OF RIGHTS OF MAN.(1)

Paris, 11th of November, 1st Year of the Republic. [1792.]

Mr. Attorney General:

Sir,--As there can be no personal resentment between two strangers, I
write this letter to you, as to a man against whom I have no animosity.

You have, as Attorney General, commenced a prosecution against me, as
the author of Rights of Man. Had not my duty, in consequence of my being
elected a member of the National Convention of France, called me from
England, I should have staid to have contested the injustice of
that prosecution; not upon my own account, for I cared not about the
prosecution, but to have defended the principles I had advanced in the
work.

1 Read to the Jury by the Attorney General, Sir Archibald
Macdonald, at