1 This pamphlet was written between the defeat of Pichegru's attempt, September 4, 1794, and November 12, of the same year, the date of the Bien-informé in which the publication is noticed. General Pichegra (Charles), (1761-1804) having joined a royalist conspiracy against the Republic, was banished to Cayenne (1797), whence he escaped to England; having returned to Paris (1804) he was imprisoned in the Temple, and there found strangled by a silk handkerchief, whether by his own or another's act remaining doubtful. --Editor. When an extraordinary measure, not warranted by established constitutional rules, and justifiable only on the supreme law of absolute necessity, bursts suddenly upon us, we must, in order to form a true judgment thereon, carry our researches back to the times that preceded and occasioned it. Taking up then the subject with respect to the event of the Eighteenth of Fructidor on this ground, I go to examine the state of things prior to that period. I begin with the establishment of the constitution of the year 3 of the French Republic. A better _organized_ constitution has never yet been devised by human wisdom. It is, in its organization, free from all the vices and defects to which other forms of government are more or less subject. I will speak first of the legislative body, because the Legislature is, in the natural order of things, the first power; the Executive is the first magistrate. By arranging the legislative body into two divisions, as is done in the French Constitution, the one, (the Council of Five Hundred,) whose part it is to conceive and propose laws; the other, a Council of Ancients, to review, approve, or reject the laws proposed; all the security is given that can arise from coolness of reflection acting upon, or correcting the precipitancy or enthusiasm of conception and imagination. It is seldom that our first thought, even upon any subject, is sufficiently just.(1) 1 For Paine's ideas on the right division of representatives into two chambers, which differ essentially from any bicameral system ever adopted, see vol. ii., p. 444 of this work; also, in the present volume, Chapter XXXIV.-- _Editor._. The policy of renewing the Legislature by a third part each year, though not entirely new, either in theory or in practice, is nevertheless one of the modern improvements in the science of government. It prevents, on the one hand, that convulsion and precipitate change of measures into which a nation might be surprised by the going out of the whole Legislature at the same time, and the instantaneous election of a new one; on the other hand, it excludes that common interest from taking place that might tempt a whole Legislature, whose term of duration expired at once, to usurp the right of continuance. I go now to speak of the Executive.