Every man who has
served in an assembly is ineligible for two years after. Just as these
magistrates begin to learn their trade, like chimney sweepers, they
are disqualified for exercising it. Superficial, new, petulant
acquisition, and interrupted, dronish, broken, ill recollection is
to be the destined character of all your future governors. Your
constitution has too much of jealousy to have much of sense in it. You
consider the breach of trust in the representative so principally that
you do not at all regard the question of his fitness to execute it.
This purgatory interval is not unfavorable to a faithless
representative, who may be as good a canvasser as he was a bad
governor. In this time he may cabal himself into a superiority over
the wisest and most virtuous. As in the end all the members of this
elective constitution are equally fugitive and exist only for the
election, they may be no longer the same persons who had chosen him,
to whom he is to be responsible when he solicits for a renewal of
his trust. To call all the secondary electors of the Commune to
account is ridiculous, impracticable, and unjust; they may
themselves have been deceived in their choice, as the third set of
electors, those of the Department, may be in theirs. In your elections
responsibility cannot exist.
FINDING NO SORT OF PRINCIPLE of coherence with each other in the
nature and constitution of the several new republics of France, I
considered what cement the legislators had provided for them from
any extraneous materials.
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