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 of power which
without their permission you had seized upon. This is to give a direct
sanction to fraud, hypocrisy, perjury, and the breach of the most sacred
trusts that can exist between man and man. What can sound with such
horrid discordance in the moral ear as this position,--that a delegate
with limited powers may break his sworn engagements to his constituent,
assume an authority, never committed to him, to alter all things at his
pleasure, and then, if he can persuade a large number of men to flatter
him in the power he has usurped, that he is absolved in his own
conscience, and ought to stand acquitted in the eyes of mankind? On this
scheme, the maker of the experiment must begin with a determined
perjury.
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