those very districts over whom they have obtained a preference in consequence of their ostensible contribution.  If the masses were independent, sovereign bodies, who were to provide for a federative treasury by distinct contingents, and that the revenue had not (as it has) many impositions running through the whole, which affect men individually, and not corporately, and which, by their nature, confound all territorial limits, something might be said for the basis of contribution as founded on masses.  But, of all things, this representation, to be measured by contribution, is the most difficult to settle upon principles of equity in a country which considers its districts as members of a whole.  For a great city, such as Bordeaux or Paris, appears to pay a vast body of duties, almost out of all assignable proportion to other places, and its mass is considered accordingly.  But are these cities the true contributors in that proportion?  No.  The consumers of the commodities imported into Bordeaux, who are scattered through all France, pay the import duties of Bordeaux.  The produce of the vintage in Guienne and Languedoc give to that city the means of its contribution growing out of an export commerce.  The landholders who spend their estates in Paris, and are thereby the creators of that city, contribute for Paris from the provinces out of which their revenues arise.  Very nearly the same arguments will apply to the representative share given on account of direct contribution:  because the direct contribution must be assessed on wealth, real or presumed; and that local wealth will itself arise from causes not local, and which therefore in equity ought not to produce a local preference.

It is very remarkable, that, in this fundamental regulation which settles the representation of the mass upon the direct contribution, they have not yet settled how that direct contribution shall be laid, and how apportioned.  Perhaps there is some latent policy towards the continuance of the present Assembly in this strange procedure.  However, until they do this, they can have no certain constitution.  It must depend at last upon the system of taxation, and must vary with every variation in that system.  As they have contrived matters, their taxation does not so much depend on their constitution as their constitution on their taxation.  This must introduce great confusion among the masses; as the variable qualification for votes within the district must, if ever real contested elections take place, cause infinite internal controversies.

To compare together the three bases, not on their political reason, but on the ideas on which the Assembly works, and to try its consistency with itself, we cannot avoid observing that the principle which the committee call the basis of population does not begin to operate from the same point with the two other principles, called the bases of territory and of contribution, which are both of an aristocratic