steadiness, and preserve something like consistency in the proceedings of state.  Such a body kings generally have as a council.  A monarchy may exist without it; but it seems to be in the very essence of a republican government.  It holds a sort of middle place between the supreme power exercised by the people, or immediately delegated from them, and the mere executive.  Of this there are no traces in your Constitution; and in providing nothing of this kind, your Solons and Numas have, as much as in anything else, discovered a sovereign incapacity.

Let us now turn our eyes to what they have done towards the formation of an executive power.  For this they have chosen a degraded king.  This their first executive officer is to be a machine, without any sort of deliberative discretion in any one act of his function.  At best, he is but a channel to convey to the National Assembly such matter as may import that body to know.  If he had been made the exclusive channel, the power would not have been without its importance, though infinitely perilous to those who would choose to exercise it.  But public intelligence and statement of facts may pass to the Assembly with equal authenticity through any other conveyance.  As to the means, therefore, of giving a direction to measures by the statement of an authorized reporter, this office of intelligence is as nothing.

To consider the French scheme of an executive officer, in its two natural divisions of civil and political.—­In the first it must be observed, that, according to the new Constitution, the higher parts of judicature, in either of its lines, are not in the king.  The king of France is not the fountain of justice.  The judges, neither the original nor the appellate, are of his nomination.  He neither proposes the candidates nor has a negative on the choice.  He is not even the public prosecutor.  He serves only as a notary, to authenticate the choice made of the judges in the several districts.  By his officers he is to execute their sentence.  When we look into the true nature of his authority, he appears to be nothing more than a chief of bumbailiffs, sergeants-at-mace, catchpoles, jailers, and hangmen.  It is impossible to place anything called royalty in a more degrading point of view.  A thousand times better it had been for the dignity of this unhappy prince, that he had nothing at all to do with the administration of justice, deprived as he is of all that is venerable and all that is consolatory in that function, without power of originating any process, without a power of suspension, mitigation, or pardon.  Everything in justice that is vile and odious is thrown upon him.  It was not for nothing that the Assembly has been at such pains to remove the stigma from certain offices, when they were resolved to place the person who had lately been their king in a situation but one degree above the executioner, and in an office nearly of the same quality.  It is not in Nature, that, situated as the king of the French now is, he can respect himself or can be respected by others.