I have said that in all political questions the consequences of any assumed rights are of great moment in deciding upon their validity.  In this point of view let us a little scrutinize the effects of a right in the mere majority of the inhabitants of any country of superseding and altering their government at pleasure.

The sum total of every people is composed of its units.  Every individual must have a right to originate what afterwards is to become the act of the majority.  Whatever he may lawfully originate he may lawfully endeavor to accomplish.  He has a right, therefore, in his own particular, to break the ties and engagements which bind him to the country in which he lives; and he has a right to make as many converts to his opinions, and to obtain as many associates in his designs, as he can procure:  for how can you know the dispositions of the majority to destroy their government, but by tampering with some part of the body?  You must begin by a secret conspiracy, that you may end with a national confederation.  The mere pleasure of the beginner must be the sole guide; since the mere pleasure of others must be the sole ultimate sanction, as well as the sole actuating principle in every part of the progress.  Thus, arbitrary will (the last corruption of ruling power) step by step poisons the heart of every citizen.  If the undertaker fails, he has the misfortune of a rebel, but not the guilt.  By such doctrines, all love to our country, all pious veneration and attachment to its laws and customs, are obliterated from our minds; and nothing can result from this opinion, when grown into a principle, and animated by discontent, ambition, or enthusiasm, but a series of conspiracies and seditions, sometimes ruinous to their authors, always noxious to the state.  No sense of duty can prevent any man from being a leader or a follower in such enterprises.  Nothing restrains the tempter; nothing guards the tempted.  Nor is the new state, fabricated by such arts, safer than the old.  What can prevent the mere will of any person, who hopes to unite the wills of others to his own, from an attempt wholly to overturn it?  It wants nothing but a disposition to trouble the established order, to give a title to the enterprise.

When you combine this principle of the right to change a fixed and tolerable constitution of things at pleasure with the theory and practice of the French Assembly, the political, civil, and moral irregularity are, if possible, aggravated.  The Assembly have found another road, and a far more commodious, to the destruction of an old government, and the legitimate formation of a new one, than through the previous will of the majority of what they call the people.  Get, say they, the possession of power by any means you can into your hands; and then, a subsequent consent (what they call an address of adhesion) makes your authority as much the act of the people as if they had conferred upon you originally that kind and degree