Your new constitution is the very reverse of ours in its
principle; and I am astonished how any persons could dream of
holding out anything done in it as an example for Great Britain.
With you there is little, or rather no, connection between the last
representative and the first constituent. The member who goes to the
National Assembly is not chosen by the people, nor accountable to
them. There are three elections before he is chosen; two sets of
magistracy intervene between him and the primary assembly, so as to
render him, as I have said, an ambassador of a state, and not the
representative of the people within a state. By this the whole
spirit of the election is changed, nor can any corrective which your
constitution-mongers have devised render him anything else than what
he is. The very attempt to do it would inevitably introduce a
confusion, if possible, more horrid than the present. There is no
way to make a connection between the original constituent and the
representative, but by the circuitous means which may lead the
candidate to apply in the first instance to the primary electors, in
order that by their authoritative instructions (and something more
perhaps) these primary electors may force the two succeeding bodies of
electors to make a choice agreeable to their wishes. But this would
plainly subvert the whole scheme. It would be to plunge them back into
that tumult and confusion of popular election which, by their
interposed gradation of elections, they mean to avoid, and at length
to risk the whole fortune of the state with those who have the least
knowledge of it and the least interest in it.
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