It ought to give a
security to its justice against its power. It ought to make its
judicature, as it were, something exterior to the state.
These parliaments had furnished, not the best certainly, but
some considerable corrective to the excesses and vices of the
monarchy. Such an independent judicature was ten times more
necessary when a democracy became the absolute power of the country.
In that constitution, elective temporary, local judges, such as you
have contrived, exercising their dependent functions in a narrow
society, must be the worst of all tribunals. In them it will be vain
to look for any appearance of justice toward strangers, toward the
obnoxious rich, toward the minority of routed parties, toward all
those who in the election have supported unsuccessful candidates. It
will be impossible to keep the new tribunals clear of the worst spirit
of faction. All contrivances by ballot we know experimentally to be
vain and childish to prevent a discovery of inclinations. Where they
may the best answer the purposes of concealment, they answer to
produce suspicion, and this is a still more mischievous cause of
partiality.
If the parliaments had been preserved, instead of being
dissolved at so ruinous a charge to the nation, they might have served
in this new commonwealth, perhaps not precisely the same (I do not
mean an exact parallel), but nearly the same, purposes as the court
and senate of Areopagus did in Athens; that is, as one of the balances
and correctives to the evils of a light and unjust democracy.
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