I have taken a view of what has been done by the governing power in France.  I have certainly spoke of it with freedom.  Those whose principle it is to despise the ancient, permanent sense of mankind, and to set up a scheme of society on new principles, must naturally expect that such of us who think better of the judgment of the human race than, of theirs should consider both them and their devices as men and schemes upon their trial.  They must take it for granted that we attend much to their reason, but not at all to their authority.  They have not one of the great influencing prejudices of mankind in their favor.  They avow their hostility to opinion.  Of course they must expect no support from that influence, which, with every other authority, they have deposed from the seat of its jurisdiction.

I can never consider this Assembly as anything else than a voluntary association of men who have availed themselves of circumstances to seize upon the power of the state.  They have not the sanction and authority of the character under which they first met.  They have assumed another of a very different nature, and have completely altered and inverted all the relations in which they originally stood.  They do not hold the authority they exercise under any constitutional law of the state.  They have departed from the instructions of the people by whom they were sent; which instructions, as the Assembly did not act in virtue of any ancient usage or settled law, were the sole source of their authority.  The most considerable of their acts have not been done by great majorities; and in this sort of near divisions, which carry only the constructive authority of the whole, strangers will consider reasons as well as resolutions.

If they had set up this new, experimental government as a necessary substitute for an expelled tyranny, mankind would anticipate the time of prescription, which through long usage mellows into legality governments that were violent in their commencement.  All those who have affections which lead them to the conservation of civil order would recognize, even in its cradle, the child as legitimate, which has been produced from those principles of cogent expediency to which all just governments owe their birth, and on which they justify their continuance.  But they will be late and reluctant in giving any sort of countenance to the operations of a power which has derived its birth from no law and no necessity, but which, on the contrary, has had its origin in those vices and sinister practices by which the social union is often disturbed and sometimes destroyed.  This Assembly has hardly a year’s prescription.  We have their own word for it that they have made a revolution.  To make a revolution is a measure which, prima fronte, requires an apology.  To make a revolution is to subvert the ancient state of our country; and no common reasons are called for to justify so violent a proceeding.  The sense of mankind authorizes us to examine into the mode of acquiring new power, and to criticize on the use that is made of it, with less awe and reverence than that which is usually conceded to a settled and recognized authority.