dock to be refitted.  Every man who has served in an Assembly is ineligible for two years after.  Just as these magistrates begin to learn their trade, like chimney-sweepers, they are disqualified for exercising it.  Superficial, new, petulant acquisition, and interrupted, dronish, broken, ill recollection, is to be the destined character of all your future governors.  Your Constitution has too much of jealousy to have much of sense in it.  You consider the breach of trust in the representative so principally that you do not at all regard the question of his fitness to execute it.

This purgatory interval is not unfavorable to a faithless representative, who may be as good a canvasser as he was a bad governor.  In this time he may cabal himself into a superiority over the wisest and most virtuous.  As, in the end, all the members of this elective Constitution are equally fugitive, and exist only for the election, they may be no longer the same persons who had chosen him, to whom he is to be responsible when he solicits for a renewal of his trust.  To call all the secondary electors of the commune to account is ridiculous, impracticable, and unjust:  they may themselves have been deceived in their choice, as the third set of electors, those of the department, may be in theirs.  In your elections responsibility cannot exist.

Finding no sort of principle of coherence with each other in the nature and constitution of the several new republics of France, I considered what cement the legislators had provided for them from any extraneous materials.  Their confederations, their spectacles, their civic feasts, and their enthusiasm I take no notice of; they are nothing but mere tricks; but tracing their policy through their actions, I think I can distinguish the arrangements by which they propose to hold these republics together.  The first is the confiscation, with the compulsory paper currency annexed to it; the second is the supreme power of the city of Paris; the third is the general army of the state.  Of this last I shall reserve what I have to say, until I come to consider the army as an head by itself.

As to the operation of the first (the confiscation and paper currency) merely as a cement, I cannot deny that these, the one depending on the other, may for some time compose some sort of cement, if their madness and folly in the management, and in the tempering of the parts together, does not produce a repulsion in the very outset.  But allowing to the scheme some coherence and some duration, it appears to me, that, if, after a while, the confiscation should not be found sufficient to support the paper coinage, (as I am morally certain it will not,) then, instead of cementing, it will add infinitely to the dissociation, distraction, and confusion of these confederate republics, both with relation to each other and to the several parts within themselves.  But if the confiscation should so far succeed as to sink the paper currency, the cement is gone with the circulation.  In the mean time its binding force will be very uncertain, and it will straiten or relax with every variation in the credit of the paper.