and dangerous to publish. As the Assembly ought to be permanent, it will make provision for them as they happen to arise. It will have trouble sufficient in rectifying the past, and regulating the present, without taking fruitless pains in enacting laws for an unknown futurity.

Whatever wisdom may preside over the digesting of this Code, it is not to be imagined that it's laws are to possess immutability. Nothing is immutable, the Laws of Nature excepted, because their author alone, from his infinite wisdom, knows the exigencies of all beings at all times: the legislators of Nations on the contrary being but men, scarcely know the exigencies of the moment, and can have no foresight of those which futurity is preparing for them.

Political laws therefore ought to be variable, because they interest families only, bodies of men countries, which are themselves subject to change: and the Laws of Nature must be permanent, because they are the laws of man, and of the human species, whose rights are invariable. Now I do not know one State in Europe but what has rendered the political laws permanent, and those of Nature so variable, that scarcely at the present day is it possible to perceive the traces of them.

The hereditary rights of Nobility, for example, which was not originally transmissive, is a political law rendered permanent all over Europe: it ought nevertheless to vary according to the exigencies of States; for it must be foreseen that noble families will multiply themselves more than others, because they have greater credit, and consequently more ample means of subsisting; and because families of

opulent

opulent tradesmen will have a constant tendency to incorporate with them, by obtaining letters of nobility; so that the number of persons who do nothing being continually on the increase, and that of the laborious continually diminishing, the State, at the expiration of some ages, may feel itself enfeebled by it's own Constitution.

This in fact has actually taken place in Spain and other Countries. Spain has been weakened neither by wars nor by emigrations to America, as so many politicians have alleged; but on the contrary by peace, and the excessive multiplication of noble families which has resulted from it. The long and bloody wars of the League cut off great numbers of men of family in France; but France, so far from being weakened, increased in the population and riches up to the time of Louis XIV. The emigrations from England, a country much smaller than Spain, have formed in America colonies much more flourishing and more populous than the Spanish; and so far from diminishing the strength of England, they would have increased it had they been more closely united to the Mother Country, from which they separated merely in consequence of their strength.

It is because in England the interests of the Nobility are linked to those of the People, and because like them, they apply to agriculture, to commercial Navigation and Trade. Finally, the several States in Italy which, as Genoa, Venice, Naples, and in Sicily, &c, have had neither wars to support nor Colonies to supply, are reduced to a state of weakness which is constantly increasing, with

out the possibility of ascribing it to any other cause but the inheritance of Nobility, and fresh patents which are continually multiplying the class of idle Noblemen, at the expense of the laborious classes of the People.

If the ancient Episcopal Law, which in Europe enjoined testators to leave by Will, under pain of having their testaments declared null and void, bequests in favour of the Church, with deprivation of Christian burial to those who died intestate, had not been abrogated, as well as the permission to the mortmain gentry to acquire landed property, it is undoubtedly certain that all our lands would have been long ago at the command of the Clergy, as all our dignities are at the disposal of the Nobility. It is farther certain, that if the custom which permits gentlemen of finance to job in the Public Funds, be not abolished, all our specie will find it's way into the pockets of brokers. The case is the same with privileged companies of every kind. Thus a Nation may, merely by the permanency of laws and customs, which perhaps formerly contributed to it's prosperity, find itself stripped at length of it's honour, of it's lands, of it's commerce, and of it's liberty.

A Nation, on the contrary, by rendering variable, for the interest of certain bodies of men, the Laws of Nature which ought to be permanent, abolishes at the long-run most of the rights of Man: sometimes they are those of marriage, sometimes those of personal liberty, as on Mount Jura, and in our Colonies, &c.

It must therefore be a fundamental law of our

future

future Constitution, that the Laws of Nature alone shall be permanent, and that every political law may be changed and amended by the National Assembly as often as the good of the Nation may require, as the happiness of a Nation is itself a consequence of that Law of Nature which she constantly proposes to herself, in the variable harmony of her works, the felicity of all Mankind.

But as the Laws of Nature themselves disappear in societies, from the prejudices merely which are instilled into infancy, to such a degree that men come in time to believe what is natural to them is foreign, and what is foreign natural, it is necessary to rest the basis of our future Constitution, on a national education, in order that, should reason fail, it may become agreeable to our posterity at least by the allurement of habit.

WISHES FOR A NATIONAL EDUCATION.

PREVIOUS to the establishment of a school for the citizens at large, there must be formed a school for teachers. It fills me with astonishment to think that the acquisition of every art requires the serving of an apprenticeship, the most difficult of all excepted, the art of forming men. Nor is this all. The occupation of instructing youth is usually the resource of persons who possess no particular talent. The National Assembly ought to pay special attention to so necessary an establishment. They will make choice of men proper

to execute the office of instructors, not from among doctors and caballers, as the custom has been, but among respectable fathers of families who may have themselves educated their own children properly. I do not mean such as have made their young people scholars and wits, but those who have rendered them pious, modest, ingenious, gentle, obliging and happy, that is, who have left them nearly such as Nature had formed them. There will be no occasion, in order to fill those places, either for diplomas of A. M. or D. D. but the production of beautiful and well-disposed children; and as we form a judgment of the workman by his work, that man should be deemed capable of instructing the families of the State, who has educated his own family wisely and well,

Those instructors ought to enjoy personal Nobility, in consideration of the dignity of their functions. They must be under the immediate inspection of the National Assembly, and have under their superintendance all the masters of sciences, languages, arts and exercises. They must be spread over the principal subdivisions of Paris, and through all the Cities of the Kingdom, to establish National Schools in them; and not even a village schoolmaster should be permitted to teach but by their appointment.

They will apply themselves, first of all, to the reformation of the whole system of our gothic and barbarous education, of the age of Charlemagne. It is unnecessary to say that they will banish from it languor, sadness, tears, corporal chastisements; that they will train up young ones to love

and