Old establishments are tried by their effects.  If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest.  We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.  In old establishments various correctives have been found for their aberrations from theory.  Indeed, they are the results of various necessities and expediences.  They are not often constructed after any theory:  theories are rather drawn from them.  In them we often see the end best obtained, where the means seem not perfectly reconcilable to what we may fancy was the original scheme.  The means taught by experience may be better suited to political ends than those contrived in the original project.  They again react upon the primitive constitution, and sometimes improve the design itself, from which they seem to have departed.  I think all this might be curiously exemplified in the British Constitution.  At worst, the errors and deviations of every kind in reckoning are found and computed, and the ship proceeds in her course.  This is the case of old establishments; but in a new and merely theoretic system, it is expected that every contrivance shall appear, on the face of it, to answer its ends, especially where the projectors are no way embarrassed with an endeavor to accommodate the new building to an old one, either in the walls or on the foundations.

The French builders, clearing away as mere rubbish whatever they found, and, like their ornamental gardeners, forming everything into an exact level, propose to rest the whole local and general legislature on three bases of three different kinds,—­one geometrical, one arithmetical, and the third financial; the first of which they call the basis of territory; the second, the basis of population; and the third, the basis of contribution.  For the accomplishment of the first of these purposes, they divide the area of their country into eighty-three pieces, regularly square, of eighteen leagues by eighteen.  These large divisions are called Departments.  These they portion, proceeding by square measurement, into seventeen hundred and twenty districts, called Communes.  These again they subdivide, still proceeding by square measurement, into smaller districts, called Cantons, making in all 6,400.

At first view this geometrical basis of theirs presents not much to admire or to blame.  It calls for no great legislative talents.  Nothing more than an accurate land-surveyor, with his chain, sight, and theodolite, is requisite for such a plan as this.  In the old divisions of the country, various accidents at times, and the ebb and flow of various properties and jurisdictions, settled their bounds.  These bounds were not made upon any fixed system, undoubtedly.  They were subject to some inconveniences; but they were inconveniences for which use had found remedies, and habit had supplied accommodation and patience.  In this new pavement of square within square, and this organization and semi-organization, made on the system of Empedocles and Buffon, and not upon any politic principle, it is impossible that innumerable local inconveniences, to which men are not habituated, must not arise.  But these I pass over, because it requires an accurate knowledge of the country, which I do not possess, to specify them.