Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies, From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 3Jefferson, Thomas
History
Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies, From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 3
Jefferson, Thomas
United States -- Politics and government -- 1775-1783; United States -- Politics and government -- 1783-1865
To detail to you the events of this country, would require a volume. It
would be useless too; because those given in the Leyden gazette, though
not universally true, have so few and such unimportant errors mixed with
them, that you may give a general faith to them. I will rather give
you, therefore, what that paper cannot give, the views of the prevailing
power, as far as they can be collected from conversation and writings.
They will distribute the powers of government into three parts,
legislative, judiciary, and executive. The legislative will certainly
have no hereditary branch, probably not even a select one, (like our
Senate). If they divide it into two chambers at all, it will be by
breaking the representative body into two equal halves by lot. But
very many are for a single House, and particularly the Turgotists. The
imperfection of their legislative body, I think, will be, that not a
member of it will be chosen by the people directly. Their representation
will be an equal one, in which every man will elect and be elected as
a citizen, not as of a distinct order. _Quære_, whether they will elect
placemen and pensioners? Their legislature will meet periodically,
and sit at their own will, with a power in the executive to call
them extraordinarily, in case of emergencies. There is a considerable
division of sentiment whether the executive shall have a negative on
the laws. I think they will determine to give such a negative, either
absolute or qualified. In the judiciary, the parliaments will be
suppressed, less numerous judiciary bodies instituted, and trial by jury
established in criminal, if not in civil cases. The executive power
will be left entire in the hands of the King. They will establish the
responsibility of ministers, gifts and appropriations of money by the
National Assembly alone; consequently a civil list, freedom of the
press, freedom of religion, freedom of commerce and industry, freedom
of person against arbitrary arrests, and modifications, if not a total
prohibition, of military agency in civil cases. I do not see how they
can prohibit, altogether, the aid of the military in cases of riot,
and yet I doubt whether they can descend from the sublimity of ancient
military pride, to let a Marechal of France, with his troops, be
commanded by a magistrate. They cannot conceive that General Washington,
at the head of his army, during the late war, could have been commanded
by a common constable to go as his _posse comitates_, to suppress a mob,
and that Count Rochambeau, when he was arrested at the head of his army
by a sheriff, must have gone to jail if he had not given bail to appear
in court. Though they have gone astonishing lengths, they are not yet
thus far. It is probable, therefore, that not knowing how to use the
military as a civil weapon, they will do too much or too little with it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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