Your new Constitution is the very reverse of ours in its principle; and I am astonished how any persons could dream of holding out anything done in it as an example for Great Britain.  With you there is little, or rather no, connection between the last representative and the first constituent.  The member who goes to the National Assembly is not chosen by the people, nor accountable to them.  There are three elections before he is chosen; two sets of magistracy intervene between him and the primary assembly, so as to render him, as I have said, an ambassador of a state, and not the representative of the people within a state.  By this the whole spirit of the election is changed; nor can any corrective your Constitution-mongers have devised render him anything else than what he is.  The very attempt to do it would inevitably introduce a confusion, if possible, more horrid than the present.  There is no way to make a connection between the original constituent and the representative, but by the circuitous means which may lead the candidate to apply in the first instance to the primary electors, in order that by their authoritative instructions (and something more perhaps) these primary electors may force the two succeeding bodies of electors to make a choice agreeable to their wishes.  But this would plainly subvert the whole scheme.  It would be to plunge them back into that tumult and confusion of popular election, which, by their interposed gradation of elections, they mean to avoid, and at length to risk the whole fortune of the state with those who have the least knowledge of it and the least interest in it.  This is a perpetual dilemma, into which they are thrown by the vicious, weak, and contradictory principles they have chosen.  Unless the people break up and level this gradation, it is plain that they do not at all substantially elect to the Assembly; indeed, they elect as little in appearance as reality.

What is it we all seek for in an election?  To answer its real purposes, you must first possess the means of knowing the fitness of your man; and then you must retain some hold upon him by personal obligation or dependence.  For what end are these primary electors complimented, or rather mocked, with a choice?  They can never know anything of the qualities of him that is to serve them, nor has he any obligation whatsoever to them.  Of all the powers unfit to be delegated by those who have any real means of judging, that most peculiarly unfit is what relates to a personal choice.  In case of abuse, that body of primary electors never can call the representative to an account for his conduct.  He is too far removed from them in the chain of representation.  If he acts improperly at the end of his two years’ lease, it does not concern him for two years more.  By the new French Constitution the best and the wisest representatives go equally with the worst into this Limbus Patrum.  Their bottoms are supposed foul, and they must go into