The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself.  It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice.  The possessors of family wealth, and of the distinction which attends hereditary possession, (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission.  With us the House of Peers is formed upon this principle.  It is wholly composed of hereditary property and hereditary distinction, and made, therefore, the third of the legislature, and, in the last event, the sole judge of all property in all its subdivisions.  The House of Commons, too, though not necessarily, yet in fact, is always so composed, in the far greater part.  Let those large proprietors be what they will, (and they have their chance of being amongst the best,) they are, at the very worst, the ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth.  For though hereditary wealth, and the rank which goes with it, are too much idolized by creeping sycophants, and the blind, abject admirers of power, they are too rashly slighted in shallow speculations of the petulant, assuming, short-sighted coxcombs of philosophy.  Some decent, regulated preeminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic.

It is said that twenty-four millions ought to prevail over two hundred thousand.  True; if the constitution of a kingdom be a problem of arithmetic.  This sort of discourse does well enough with the lamp-post for its second:  to men who may reason calmly it is ridiculous The will of the many, and their interest, must very often differ; and great will be the difference when they make an evil choice.  A government of five hundred country attorneys and obscure curates is not good for twenty-four millions of men, though it were chosen by eight-and-forty millions; nor is it the better for being guided by a dozen of persons of quality who have betrayed their trust in order to obtain that power.  At present, you seem in everything to have strayed out of the high road of Nature.  The property of France does not govern it.  Of course property is destroyed, and rational liberty has no existence.  All you have got for the present is a paper circulation, and a stock-jobbing constitution:  and as to the future, do you seriously think that the territory of France, upon the republican system of eighty-three independent municipalities, (to say nothing of the parts that compose them,) can ever be governed as one body, or can ever be set in motion by the impulse of one mind?  When the National Assembly has completed its work, it will have accomplished its ruin.  These commonwealths will not long bear a state of subjection to the republic of Paris.  They will not bear that this one body should monopolize the captivity of the king, and the dominion over the