But they had particulars in their constitution, and
those not a few, which deserved approbation from the wise. They
possessed one fundamental excellence: they were independent. The
most doubtful circumstance attendant on their office, that of its
being vendible, contributed however to this independence of character.
They held for life. Indeed, they may be said to have held by
inheritance. Appointed by the monarch, they were considered as
nearly out of his power. The most determined exertions of that
authority against them only showed their radical independence. They
composed permanent bodies politic, constituted to resist arbitrary
innovation; and from that corporate constitution, and from most of
their forms, they were well calculated to afford both certainty and
stability to the laws. They had been a safe asylum to secure these
laws in all the revolutions of humor and opinion. They had saved
that sacred deposit of the country during the reigns of arbitrary
princes and the struggles of arbitrary factions. They kept alive the
memory and record of the constitution. They were the great security to
private property which might be said (when personal liberty had no
existence) to be, in fact, as well guarded in France as in any other
country. Whatever is supreme in a state ought to have, as much as
possible, its judicial authority so constituted as not only not to
depend upon it, but in some sort to balance it.
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