citizens, and no individual may attribute to themselves sovereignty, to exercise authority and fill any public function, without a formal delegation by the law. 29. Social security cannot exist where the limits of public administration are not clearly determined by law, and where the responsibility of all public functionaries is not assured. 30. All citizens are bound to co-operate in this guarantee, and to enforce the law when summoned in its name. 31. Men united in society should have legal means of resisting oppression. In every free government the mode of resisting different acts of oppression should be regulated by the Constitution. 32. It is oppression when a law violates the natural rights, civil and political, which it should ensure. It is oppression when the law is violated by public officials in its application to individual cases. It is oppression when arbitrary acts violate the rights of citizens against the terms of the law. 33. A people has always the right to revise, reform, and change its Constitution. One generation has no right to bind future generations, and all heredity in offices is absurd and tyrannical. It now appears plain that Robespierre, Marat, and the Mountaineers generally were resolved that there should be no new government The difference between them and their opponents was fundamental: to them the Revolution was an end, to the others a means. The Convention was a purely revolutionary body. It had arbitrarily absorbed all legislative and judicial functions, exercising them without responsibility to any code or constitution. For instance, in State Trials French law required three fourths of the voices for condemnation; had the rule been followed Louis XVI. would not have perished. Lanjuinais had pressed the point, and it was answered that the sentence on Louis was political, for the interest of the State; _salus populi suprema lex_. This implied that the Convention, turning aside from its appointed functions, had, in anticipation of the judicial forms it meant to establish, constituted itself into a Vigilance Committee to save the State in an emergency. But it never turned back again to its proper work. Now when the Constitution was framed, every possible obstruction was placed in the way of its adoption, which would have relegated most of the Mountaineers to private life.