Every
one knows that this tribunal was the great stay of that state; every
one knows with what care it was upheld, and with what a religious
awe it was consecrated. The parliaments were not wholly free from
faction, I admit; but this evil was exterior and accidental, and not
so much the vice of their constitution itself, as it must be in your
new contrivance of sexennial elective judicatories. Several English
commend the abolition of the old tribunals, as supposing that they
determined everything by bribery and corruption. But they have stood
the test of monarchic and republican scrutiny. The court was well
disposed to prove corruption on those bodies when the were dissolved
in 1771. Those who have again dissolved them would have done the
same if they could, but both inquisitions having failed, I conclude
that gross pecuniary corruption must have been rather rare amongst
them.
It would have been prudent, along with the parliaments, to
preserve their ancient power of registering, and of remonstrating at
least upon, all the decrees of the National Assembly, as they did upon
those which passed in the time of the monarchy. It would be a means of
squaring the occasional decrees of a democracy to some principles of
general jurisprudence. The vice of the ancient democracies, and one
cause of their ruin, was that they ruled, as you do, by occasional
decrees, psephismata.
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