I might further exemplify the possibility of a political sentiment running through various states, and combining factions in them, from the history of the Middle Ages in the Guelfs and Ghibellines.  These were political factions originally in favor of the Emperor and the Pope, with no mixture of religious dogmas:  or if anything religiously doctrinal they had in them originally, it very soon disappeared; as their first political objects disappeared also, though the spirit remained.  They became no more than names to distinguish factions:  but they were not the less powerful in their operation, when they had no direct point of doctrine, either religious or civil, to assert.  For a long time, however, those factions gave no small degree of influence to the foreign chiefs in every commonwealth in which they existed.  I do not mean to pursue further the track of these parties.  I allude to this part of history only as it furnishes an instance of that species of faction which broke the locality of public affections, and united descriptions of citizens more with strangers than with their countrymen of different opinions.

[Sidenote:  French fundamental principle.]

The political dogma, which, upon the new French system, is to unite the factions of different nations, is this:  “That the majority, told by the head, of the taxable people in every country, is the perpetual, natural, unceasing, indefeasible sovereign; that this majority is perfectly master of the form as well as the administration of the state, and that the magistrates, under whatever names they are called, are only functionaries to obey the orders (general as laws or particular as decrees) which that majority may make; that this is the only natural government; that all others are tyranny and usurpation.”

[Sidenote:  Practical project.]

In order to reduce this dogma into practice, the republicans in France, and their associates in other countries, make it always their business, and often their public profession, to destroy all traces of ancient establishments, and to form a new commonwealth in each country, upon the basis of the French Rights of Man.  On the principle of these rights, they mean to institute in every country, and as it were the germ of the whole, parochial governments, for the purpose of what they call equal representation.  From them is to grow, by some media, a general council and representative of all the parochial governments.  In that representative is to be vested the whole national power,—­totally abolishing hereditary name and office, levelling all conditions of men, (except where money must make a difference,) breaking all connection between territory and dignity, and abolishing every species of nobility, gentry, and Church establishments:  all their priests and all their magistrates being only creatures of election and pensioners at will.