Gazette Of The United States And Daily Evening Advertiser

From the American Minerva.
REVOLUTION IN FRANCE.

This subject is a theme of general conversation, and furnishes an inexhaustible fund of useful reflections. Men of all nations, who have enlarged ideas of social happiness, have been looking upon that event, as most propitious to the progress of truth, reason, science, freedom, and national improvements.

The ardor of their wishes is still the same, tho' their hopes have been dampened by the scenes of blood and tyranny which have been exhibited, during the progress of the revolution.

What then have been the causes of the sanguinary, and irregular proceedings of the legislators of France, which have abated the ardor of our hopes, and wounded the feelings of all good men? This is certainly an enquiry of vast magnitude; and a satisfactory elucidation of this point, will be a valuable acquisition to the statesman of all countries.

Men whose minds are warped by prejudice, and who never examine causes while the events please them, say "All the severe measures of the ruling powers in France have been occasioned by the combination of tyrants to destroy the liberties of the French, or by internal treachery." With these people all the sanguinary proceedings in that country are deemed necessary; and therefore justifiable.

I admit in the first place, that whether such measures are necessary or not, it is clearly good policy in the Convention to make the people of France believe them so; and the deception, if it is one, will spread among the advocates of the cause, in other countries. I admit, in the second place, that it is probable much of the violence committed in France may be justly attributed to the league of half the nations of Europe, for the purpose of suppressing the revolution. But a careful examination of this subject will probably satisfy any candid enquirer after truth, that most of the violence committed, and miseries suffered in France, during the revolution, have been occasioned by bad management; that is by errors which might have been avoided, had the legislators of that country been less precipitate in some of their most important steps. more governed by the maxims of experience, and less by their own passions, or visionary ideas of the theoretical forms of government, or had the revolution happened under more auspicious circumstances.

One of the first and most material errors committed by the Constituent Assembly, was to create a legislature with a single house. I believe it was not only proper but necessary, that all the different orders of men, chosen to compose the Constituent Assembly, should meet in one house, otherways the Nobles and Clergy would have negatived every act that should entrench on their exclusive and independent jurisdiction: and without abolishing many of their privileges, the revolution would have been incomplete, and probably useless.

But these orders being once abolished, and the men of rank all reduced and blended with other citizens, in point of rights, it should have been the first article of the constitution, to erect an elective Senate, to be composed of any citizens whatever, and no way distinguished from the members of the other house but by their more venerable age.

Their neglect of this article in the fundamental Code, in defiance of the experience of two thousand years, and the recent experience of America, was a proof of their contempt of old maxims and hoary headed experience, for which France has ever since been bleeding at every pore. A venerable senate is the rock of political safety to all free states. When elective, it is not an aristocracy; it is a representative body. And a division of the legislature into two branches is intended almost solely to aid and temper discussion and to restrain passions and precipitance. The history of the convention for three years past is one tissue of facts to illustrate the utility of such a division; and has done more to confirm Mr. Adams's doctrine of checks and balances in government, than a hundred folios of labored disquisition.