The next consideration is, through whom our arrangements are to be made, and on what principles the government we propose is to be established.

The first question on the people is this:  Whether we are to consider the individuals now actually in France, numerically taken and arranged into Jacobin clubs, as the body politic, constituting the nation of France,—­or whether we consider the original individual proprietors of lands, expelled since the Revolution, and the states and the bodies politic, such as the colleges of justice called Parliaments, the corporations, noble and not noble, of bailliages and towns and cities, the bishops and the clergy, as the true constituent parts of the nation, and forming the legally organized parts of the people of France.

In this serious concern it is very necessary that we should have the most distinct ideas annexed to the terms we employ; because it is evident that an abuse of the term people has been the original, fundamental cause of those evils, the cure of which, by war and policy, is the present object of all the states of Europe.

If we consider the acting power in Prance, in any legal construction of public law, as the people, the question is decided in favor of the republic one and indivisible.  But we have decided for monarchy.  If so, we have a king and subjects; and that king and subjects have rights and privileges which ought to be supported at home:  for I do not suppose that the government of that kingdom can or ought to be regulated by the arbitrary mandate of a foreign confederacy.

As to the faction exercising power, to suppose that monarchy can be supported by principled regicides, religion by professed atheists, order by clubs of Jacobins, property by committees of proscription, and jurisprudence by revolutionary tribunals, is to be sanguine in a degree of which I am incapable.  On them I decide, for myself, that these persons are not the legal corporation of France, and that it is not with them we can (if we would) settle the government of France.

Since, then, we have decided for monarchy in that kingdom, we ought also to settle who is to be the monarch, who is to be the guardian of a minor, and how the monarch and monarchy is to be modified and supported; if the monarch is to be elected, who the electors are to be,—­if hereditary, what order is established, corresponding with an hereditary monarchy, and fitted to maintain it; who are to modify it in its exercise; who are to restrain its powers, where they ought to be limited, to strengthen them, where they are to be supported, or, to enlarge them, where the object, the time, and the circumstances may demand their extension.  These are things which, in the outline, ought to be made distinct and clear; for if they are not, (especially with regard to those great points, who are the proprietors of the soil, and what is the corporation of the kingdom,) there is nothing to hinder the complete establishment of