Several English commend the abolition of the old tribunals, as supposing that they determined everything by bribery and corruption.  But they have stood the test of monarchic and republican scrutiny.  The court was well disposed to prove corruption on those bodies, when they were dissolved in 1771; those who have again dissolved them would have done the same, if they could; but both inquisitions having failed, I conclude that gross pecuniary corruption must have been rather rare amongst them.

It would have been prudent, along with the parliaments, to preserve their ancient power of registering, and of remonstrating at least upon, all the decrees of the National Assembly, as they did upon those which passed in the time of the monarchy.  It would be a means of squaring the occasional decrees of a democracy to some principles of general jurisprudence.  The vice of the ancient democracies, and one cause of their ruin, was, that they ruled, as you do, by occasional decrees, psephismata.  This practice soon broke in upon the tenor and consistency of the laws; it abated the respect of the people towards them, and totally destroyed them in the end.

Your vesting the power of remonstrance, which, in the time of the monarchy, existed in the Parliament of Paris, in your principal executive officer, whom, in spite of common sense, you persevere in calling king, is the height of absurdity.  You ought never to suffer remonstrance from him who is to execute.  This is to understand neither council nor execution, neither authority nor obedience.  The person whom you call king ought not to have this power, or he ought to have more.

Your present arrangement is strictly judicial.  Instead of imitating your monarchy, and seating your judges on a bench of independence, your object is to reduce them to the most blind obedience.  As you have changed all things, you have invented new principles of order.  You first appoint judges, who, I suppose, are to determine according to law, and then you let them know, that, at some time or other, you intend to give them some law by which they are to determine.  Any studies which they have made (if any they have made) are to be useless to them.  But to supply these studies, they are to be sworn to obey all the rules, orders, and instructions which from time to time they are to receive from the National Assembly.  These if they submit to, they leave no ground of law to the subject.  They become complete and most dangerous instruments in the hands of the governing power, which, in the midst of a cause, or on the prospect of it, may wholly change the rule of decision.  If these orders of the National Assembly come to be contrary to the will of the people who locally choose those judges, such confusion must happen as is terrible to think of.  For the judges owe their place to the local authority, and the commands they are sworn to obey come from those who have no share in their appointment.  In the mean time