It adds new force to my observations, and indeed M. de
Calonne's work supplies my deficiencies by many new and striking
arguments on most of the subjects of this letter.*
* See l'Etat de la France, p. 363.
It is this resolution, to break their country into separate
republics, which has driven them into the greatest number of their
difficulties and contradictions. If it were not for this, all the
questions of exact equality and these balances, never to be settled,
of individual rights, population, and contribution would be wholly
useless. The representation, though derived from parts, would be a
duty which equally regarded the whole. Each deputy to the Assembly
would be the representative of France, and of all its descriptions, of
the many and of the few, of the rich and of the poor, of the great
districts and of the small. All these districts would themselves be
subordinate to some standing authority, existing independently of
them, an authority in which their representation, and everything
that belongs to it, originated, and to which it was pointed. This
standing, unalterable, fundamental government would make, and it is
the only thing which could make, that territory truly and properly a
whole. With us, when we elect popular representatives, we send them to
a council in which each man individually is a subject and submitted to
a government complete in all its ordinary functions.
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