In a well organized constitution, it is supposed that a liberal spirit of party is salutary.  Here they dispute the alternatives of power and emolument, or prisons and guillotines; and the sole result to the people is the certainty of being sacrificed to the fears, and plundered by the rapacity of either faction which may chance to acquire the superiority.—­ Had the government any permanent or inherent strength, a party watching its errors, and eager to attack them, might, in time, by these perpetual collisions, give birth to some principles of liberty and order.  But, as I have often had occasion to notice, this species of republicanism is in itself so weak, that it cannot exist except by a constant recurrence to the very despotism it professes to exclude.  Hence it is jealous and suspicious, and all opposition to it is fatal; so that, to use an argument somewhat similar to Hume’s on the liberty of the press in republics, the French possess a sort of freedom which does not admit of enjoyment; and, in order to boast that they have a popular constitution, are obliged to support every kind of tyranny.*

* Hume observes, that absolute monarchies and republics nearly approach; for the excess of liberty in the latter renders such restraints necessary as to make them in practice resemble the former.

The provinces take much less interest in this event, than in one of a more general and personal effect, though not apparently of equal importance.  A very few weeks ago, the Convention asseverated, in the usual acclamatory style, that they would never even listen to a proposal for diminishing the value, or stopping the currency, of any description of assignats.  Their oaths are not, indeed, in great repute, yet many people were so far deceived, as to imagine that at least the credit of the paper would not be formally destroyed by those who had forced its circulation.  All of a sudden, and without any previous notice, a decree was issued to suppress the corsets, (or assignats of five livres,) bearing the King’s image;* and as these were very numerous, and chiefly in the hands of the lower order of people, the consternation produced by this measure was serious and unusual.—­

* The opinion that prevailed at this time that a restoration of the monarchy was intended by the Convention, had rendered every one solicitous to amass assignats issued during the late King’s reign.  Royal assignats of five livres were exchanged for six, seven, and eight livres of the republican paper.

—­There cannot be a stronger proof of the tyranny of the government, or of the national propensity to submission, than the circumstance of making it penal to refuse one day, what, by the same authority, is rendered valueless the next—­and that notwithstanding this, the remaining assignats are still received under all the probability of their experiencing a similar fate.