have a sympathy with him.  Are they forced upon him?  The whole business between them and the nominal king will be mutual counteraction.  In all other countries the office of ministers of state is of the highest dignity.  In France it is full of peril, and incapable of glory.  Rivals, however, they will have in their nothingness, whilst shallow ambition exists in the world, or the desire of a miserable salary is an incentive to short-sighted avarice.  Those competitors of the ministers are enabled by your Constitution to attack them in their vital parts, whilst they have not the means of repelling their charges in any other than the degrading character of culprits.  The ministers of state in Prance are the only persons in that country who are incapable of a share in the national councils.  What ministers!  What councils!  What a nation!—­But they are responsible.  It is a poor service that is to be had from responsibility.  The elevation of mind to be derived from fear will never make a nation glorious.  Responsibility prevents crimes.  It makes all attempts against the laws dangerous.  But for a principle of active and zealous service, none but idiots could think of it.  Is the conduct of a war to be trusted to a man who may abhor its principle,—­who, in every step he may take to render it successful, confirms the power of those by whom he is oppressed?  Will foreign states seriously treat with him who has no prerogative of peace or war,—­no, not so much as in a single vote by himself or his ministers, or by any one whom he can possibly influence?  A state of contempt is not a state for a prince:  better get rid of him at once.

I know it will be said that these humors in the court and executive government will continue only through this generation, and that the king has been brought to declare the dauphin shall be educated in a conformity to his situation.  If he is made to conform to his situation, he will have no education at all.  His training must be worse even than that of an arbitrary monarch.  If he reads,—­whether he reads or not, some good or evil genius will tell him his ancestors were kings.  Thenceforward his object must be to assert himself and to avenge his parents.  This you will say is not his duty.  That may be; but it is Nature; and whilst you pique Nature against you, you do unwisely to trust to duty.  In this futile scheme of polity, the state nurses in its bosom, for the present, a source of weakness, perplexity, counteraction, inefficiency, and decay; and it prepares the means of its final ruin.  In short, I see nothing in the executive force (I cannot call it authority) that has even an appearance of vigor, or that has the smallest degree of just correspondence or symmetry or amicable relation with the supreme power, either as it now exists, or as it is planned for the future government.