to have held by inheritance.  Appointed by the monarch, they were considered as nearly out of his power.  The most determined exertions of that authority against them only showed their radical independence.  They composed permanent bodies politic, constituted to resist arbitrary innovation; and from that corporate constitution, and from most of their forms, they were well calculated to afford both certainty and stability to the laws.  They had been a safe asylum to secure these laws, in all the revolutions of humor and opinion.  They had saved that sacred deposit of the country during the reigns of arbitrary princes and the struggles of arbitrary factions.  They kept alive the memory and record of the Constitution.  They were the great security to private property; which might be said (when personal liberty had no existence) to be, in fact, as well guarded in France as in any other country.  Whatever is supreme in a state ought to have, as much as possible, ifs judicial authority so constituted as not only not to depend upon it, but in some sort to balance it.  It ought to give a security to its justice against its power.  It ought to make its judicature, as it were, something exterior to the state.

Those parliaments had furnished, not the best certainly, but some considerable corrective to the excesses and vices of the monarchy.  Such an independent judicature was ten times more necessary when a democracy became the absolute power of the country.  In that Constitution, elective, temporary, local judges, such as you have contrived, exercising their dependent functions in a narrow society, must be the worst of all tribunals.  In them it will be vain to look for any appearance of justice towards strangers, towards the obnoxious rich, towards the minority of routed parties, towards all those who in the election have supported unsuccessful candidates.  It will be impossible to keep the new tribunals clear of the worst spirit of faction.  All contrivances by ballot we know experimentally to be vain and childish to prevent a discovery of inclinations.  Where they may the best answer the purposes of concealment, they answer to produce suspicion, and this is a still more mischievous cause of partiality.

If the parliaments had been preserved, instead of being dissolved at so ruinous a change to the nation, they might have served in this new commonwealth, perhaps not precisely the same, (I do not mean an exact parallel,) but near the same purposes as the court and senate of Areopagus did in Athens:  that is, as one of the balances and correctives to the evils of a light and unjust democracy.  Every one knows that this tribunal was the great stay of that state; every one knows with what care it was upheld, and with what a religious awe it was consecrated.  The parliaments were not wholly free from faction, I admit; but this evil was exterior and accidental, and not so much the vice of their constitution itself as it must be in your new contrivance of sexennial elective judicatories.