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    and by great intelligence as to * their results whenever Ite is not blinded by his passing veneration for every thing English . He is for ever repeating that the National Assembly ought to have adopted the English Constitution , which was in his eyes the beau

    ideal of social and political order , and he tells us , in the midst of his ecstasies about this loved panacea , with the most attractive frankness , that Brissot ' s familiar phrase on this subject was , * This is what ruined England . 11 Sieyes , Dupont , Condorcet ^ Garat , Roland , Madame Roland , and a multitude of others whom I have

    known , entertained the same opinion . '—p . 115 . Some members of the Assembly , who were fellow-countrymen of M . Dumont and Madame de Stael , shared in his error . The latter , carried away by her admiration for England ,, and by her affection for her father , could see ( like him ) no other safety for

    France than the adoption of the English system . Her brilliant imagination threw a veil over ail its defects , and she especially blamed the Assembly for not having allowed a second Chamber . Was it possible , however , that ah association , formed to reconstruct the ruined edifice of social order , should build it from the

    mouldering scaffolding of the English Charter of 1688 , covered as it was with the rust of the middle ages ? Why should France have established on such a basis , a species of Mammonocracy , in which the powers of the state are confided in preference to the wealthy , however unfitted they may be in other respects ? She who had all the vigour , the health , the freshness of youth , why should she seek her education in the school of decrepitude ?

    Was it necessary to cross the Straits for a system of checks and balances , for theories of public rights , for rules of election , of administration , of police , &c . ? Moreover , a constitution is not to be transplanted like a tree ; neither does a constitution consist solely in the establishment of an upper and lower house , an arrangement which would become useless or even pernicious without corroborating institutions , and an analogous spirit diffused through the whole .

    What is a constitution ? Is it sufficient for the enjoyment of this blessing that we should endow a deliberative assembly with the name of Parliament , and divide it into two chambers , an upper and lower ? Is it unimportant to the interests of social order what descriptions of persons are thus organised , their capacity , the spirit with which they are animated , their prejudices , the different bodies of the state , their organization and powers , the

    state of legislation , more especially as regards the safety of indi viduals , property , the partition of laud , and the executive government- —are all these unimportant ? Are they not , on the contrary , the details upon which a constitution depends , and compared with which deliberative assemblies are only solemnities ? What analogy was there , we may inquire , between the moral situation and political being of France in . 1789 , and that of Ertgtend at ttrty giveti epoch whatever f

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• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1832, page 534, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1818/page/30/