It is material to know who they are, and how constituted,
whom we consider as _the people of France_.
The next consideration is, through whom our arrangements are to be made,
and on what principles the government we propose is to be established.
The first question on the people is this: Whether we are to consider the
individuals _now actually in France, numerically taken and arranged into
Jacobin clubs_, as the body politic, constituting the nation of
France,--or whether we consider the original individual proprietors of
lands, expelled since the Revolution, and the states and the bodies
politic, such as the colleges of justice called Parliaments, the
corporations, noble and not noble, of bailliages and towns and cities,
the bishops and the clergy, as the true constituent parts of the nation,
and forming the legally organized parts of the people of France.
In this serious concern it is very necessary that we should have the
most distinct ideas annexed to the terms we employ; because it is
evident that an abuse of the term _people_ has been the original,
fundamental cause of those evils, the cure of which, by war and policy,
is the present object of all the states of Europe.
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