the following. The executive power in a hereditary
King, with a negative on laws, and power to dissolve
the legislature; to be considerably restrained in
the making of treaties, and limited in his expenses.
The legislative in a House of Representatives.
They propose a Senate also, chosen on the plan of our
federal Senate, by the Provincial Assemblies, but to
be for life, of a certain age, (they talk of forty
years), and certain wealth (four or five hundred guineas
a year), but to have no other power as to laws but
to remonstrate against them to the representatives,
who will then determine their fate by a simple majority.
This you will readily perceive is a mere council of
revision, like that of New York, which, in order to
be something, must form an alliance with the King,
to avail themselves of his veto. The alliance
will be useful to both, and to the nation. The
representatives to be chosen every two or three years.
The judiciary system is less prepared than any other
part of the plan; however, they will abolish the parliaments,
and establish an order of judges and justices, general
and provincial, a good deal like ours, with trial
by jury in criminal cases certainly, perhaps also in
civil. The provinces will have Assemblies for
their provincial government, and the cities a municipal
body for municipal government, all founded on the
basis of popular election. These subordinate governments,
though completely dependent on the general one, will
be intrusted with almost the whole of the details
which our State governments exercise. They will
have their own judiciary, final in all but great cases,
the executive business will principally pass through
their hands, and a certain local legislature will
be allowed them. In short, ours has been professedly
their model, in which such changes are made as a difference
of circumstances rendered necessary, and some others
neither necessary nor advantageous, but into which
men will ever run, when versed in theory and new in
the practice of government, when acquainted with man
only as they see him in their books and not in the
world. This plan will undoubtedly undergo changes
in the Assembly, and the longer it is delayed, the
greater will be the changes; for that Assembly, or
rather the patriotic part of it, hooped together heretofore
by a common enemy, are less compact since their victory.
That enemy (the civil and ecclesiastical aristocracy)
begins to raise its head. The lees, too, of the
patriotic party, of wicked principles and desperate
fortunes, hoping to pillage something in the wreck
of their country, are attaching themselves to the
faction of the Duke of Orleans: that faction is
caballing with the populace, and intriguing at London,
the Hague, and Berlin, and have evidently in view
the transfer of the crown to the Duke of Orleans.
He is a man of moderate understanding, of no principle,
absorbed in low vice, and incapable of abstracting
himself from the filth of that, to direct any thing
else. His name and his money, therefore, are
mere tools in the hands of those who are duping him.