of power which without their permission you had seized upon.  This is to give a direct sanction to fraud, hypocrisy, perjury, and the breach of the most sacred trusts that can exist between man and man.  What can sound with such horrid discordance in the moral ear as this position,—­that a delegate with limited powers may break his sworn engagements to his constituent, assume an authority, never committed to him, to alter all things at his pleasure, and then, if he can persuade a large number of men to flatter him in the power he has usurped, that he is absolved in his own conscience, and ought to stand acquitted in the eyes of mankind?  On this scheme, the maker of the experiment must begin with a determined perjury.  That point is certain.  He must take his chance for the expiatory addresses.  This is to make the success of villany the standard of innocence.

Without drawing on, therefore, very shocking consequences, neither by previous consent, nor by subsequent ratification of a mere reckoned majority, can any set of men attempt to dissolve the state at their pleasure.  To apply this to our present subject.  When the several orders, in their several bailliages, had met in the year 1789, (such of them, I mean, as had met peaceably and constitutionally,) to choose and to instruct their representatives, so organized and so acting, (because they were organized and were acting according to the conventions which made them a people,) they were the people of France.  They had a legal and a natural capacity to be considered as that people.  But observe, whilst they were in this state, that is, whilst they were a people, in no one of their instructions did they charge or even hint at any of those things which have drawn upon the usurping Assembly and their adherents the detestation of the rational and thinking part of mankind.  I will venture to affirm, without the least apprehension of being contradicted by any person who knows the then state of France, that, if any one of the changes were proposed, which form the fundamental parts of their Revolution, and compose its most distinguishing acts, it would not have had one vote in twenty thousand in any order.  Their instructions purported the direct contrary to all those famous proceedings which are defended as the acts of the people.  Had such proceedings been expected, the great probability is, that the people would then have risen, as to a man, to prevent them.  The whole organization of the Assembly was altered, the whole frame of the kingdom was changed, before these things could be done.  It is long to tell, by what evil arts of the conspirators, and by what extreme weakness and want of steadiness in the lawful government, this equal usurpation on the rights of the prince and people, having first cheated, and then offered violence to both, has been able to triumph, and to employ with success the forged signature of an imprisoned sovereign, and the spurious voice of dictated addresses, to a subsequent ratification of things that had never received any previous sanction, general or particular, expressed or implied, from the nation, (in whatever sense that word is taken,) or from any part of it.