they have the example of the court of Chatelet to encourage and guide them in the exercise of their functions.  That court is to try criminals sent to it by the National Assembly, or brought before it by other courses of delation.  They sit under a guard to save their own lives.  They know not by what law they judge, nor under what authority they act, nor by what tenure they hold.  It is thought that they are sometimes obliged to condemn at peril of their lives.  This is not perhaps certain, nor can it be ascertained; but when they acquit, we know they have seen the persons whom they discharge, with perfect impunity to the actors, hanged at the door of their court.

The Assembly, indeed, promises that they will form a body of law, which shall be short, simple, clear, and so forth.  That is, by their short laws, they will leave much to the discretion of the judge, whilst they have exploded the authority of all the learning which could make judicial discretion (a thing perilous at best) deserving the appellation of a sound discretion.

It is curious to observe, that the administrative bodies are carefully exempted from the jurisdiction of these new tribunals.  That is, those persons are exempted from the power of the laws who ought to be the most entirely submitted to them.  Those who execute public pecuniary trusts ought of all men to be the most strictly held to their duty.  One would have thought that it must have been among your earliest cares, if you did not mean that those administrative bodies should be real, sovereign, independent states, to form an awful tribunal, like your late parliaments, or like our King’s Bench, where all corporate officers might obtain protection in the legal exercise of their functions, and would find coercion, if they trespassed against their legal duty.  But the cause of the exemption is plain.  These administrative bodies are the great instruments of the present leaders in their progress through democracy to oligarchy.  They must therefore be put above the law.  It will be said that the legal tribunals which you have made are unfit to coerce them.  They are, undoubtedly.  They are unfit for any rational purpose.  It will be said, too, that the administrative bodies will be accountable to the general Assembly.  This, I fear, is talking without much consideration of the nature of that Assembly or of these corporations.  However, to be subject to the pleasure of that Assembly is not to be subject to law, either for protection or for constraint.

This establishment of judges as yet wants something to its completion.  It is to be crowned by a new tribunal.  This is to be a grand state judicature; and it is to judge of crimes committed against the nation, that is, against the power of the Assembly.  It seems as if they had something in their view of the nature of the high court of justice erected in England during the time of the great usurpation.  As they have not yet finished this part of the scheme,