There is one part of the Riot Act which seems very wise; it is that which makes the district in which the riots have been committed liable to be sued, by the persons whose houses or property have been destroyed, for the amount of the loss; and which directs how, when that loss has been so recovered, it shall be raised by a tax on the district. The effect of this is to make it the interest of the inhabitants of every district that the peace shall be preserved, and to render them more active than they would otherwise be in suppressing riots.

It is possible I may be mistaken on some of the information I send you, for I write in great haste: if, therefore, you mean to make any use of it, show my letter first to Trail, and he will probably be able to correct my errors.

Pray, if you ever see the Bishop of Chartres and the Abbé Sieyes, say a great many civil things to them from me. I leave full scope to your genius.

I am quite impatient for the numbers of the Courrier de Provence subsequent to 44.

Mirabeau promised me Helvetius's Letter on Montesquieu; pray torment him for it, and send it me if you can. I think the Address to the Constituents on the Tax of the fourth part of the Income admirable. If Trail be still at Paris, tell him that I am much obliged to him for giving me some account of French politics; and that I don't write to him because no news can be worth receiving from so dull a place as London, where the Duke of Orleans is feasting with the Prince of Wales in ignominious safety. Yours sincerely,

S. R.

Dear Dumont,

LETTER LXI.

TO M. DUMONT.

Nov. 17. 1789.

As we cannot yet see you, I wish you to make your stay at Paris as profitable as possible. If it is not very profitable, I think your bookseller must certainly cheat you. The Courrier de Provence is become very fashionable in London; and though the booksellers here make a profit of cent. per cent. (for they charge half a guinea for a month's subscription), yet I saw the other day, in De Boffe's shop, a list of forty-five subscribers to it. Among them were some persons of the first rank: the Duke of Portland, Lord Loughborough, Mr. Grenville the Secretary of State, Lord Mountstuart, and many others whose names I don't recollect. Elmsly has it too, and is a more fashionable bookseller than De Boffe. From all this I conclude that there will very soon be a long list of subscribers in London alone.

You know my opinion about the Ministers being in the National Assembly; I need not tell you therefore, what I think of the question' which has been lately carried on that subject. They seem to suppose the eloquence of a minister to be more dangerous than that of any other man; but the

1 The decree passed by the National Assembly on the 7th of November, 1789, to the effect that no member of the representative body should be capable of holding the situation of a Minister, as long as the Assembly to which he belonged should be in existence. See Choix de Rapports, &c. vol. v. p. 177.

fact is that it is much less dangerous, because he always speaks under the disadvantage of being supposed to be interested in every question, and all his words are weighed with peculiar distrust. Upon the supposition that seems prevalent in France, that a minister is, by virtue of his office, an enemy to the public good, they ought to rejoice at having him in the Assembly, and that he may fight against them in the face of day.

I was very sorry to see that large rewards had been offered at Paris to persons who would make discoveries of the conspirators in the plot supposed to have been formed against the nation. If France contains in it any such men as Bedloe and Titus Oates, I fear that it is likely to be disgraced with such scenes as were acted in England in the reign of Charles II., when a Popish plot was supposed to have existed, when discoveries of pretended conspiracies were every day made, and the most infamous false accusers grew rich upon the public terror and credulity, and the worst men in the nation made some of the best instruments in the foulest judicial murders.

I very much fear that the nation will follow the example we have set them as to the support of the poor; and, having taken the possessions of the clergy into their hands, and by that means deprived the poor of that resource, will establish in the place of it a certain provision. If that provision is to be distributed according to the discretion of persons in whom that trust may be reposed, it is very well; but if, as with us, any poor person shall be enabled to demand support as a matter of

right, and not be made dependent for it on the judgment of other men, I am well satisfied that it will be there, as it has been with us, a source of much greater mischiefs than any it is intended to prevent; that it will prove a great check to industry; and will, in the end, produce greater misery than would arise from the poor being left to depend entirely on the casual bounty of the charitable.

Don't you think the invention of having suppléants a very injudicious one? The people should form their judgment of a man at the moment he is about to discharge a public duty, and not a long time before. A man may enjoy the public confidence when he is named a suppléant, and may have lost it totally long before he takes his seat in the Assembly. Surely there is great inconvenience in such a man sitting as a new representative of the people. With us, whenever the King appoints a man to any office, his seat in Parliament is vacated, and an appeal is in some sort made to the people, whether the honour or the trust has been properly bestowed; and the people are called upon to say whether, notwithstanding their representative is under personal obligations to the King, they have confidence enough in him to continue him their Minister. So appeals are sometimes made from the House of Commons to the people : as, where the House expels a Member, the people, if they please, may re-elect him, and the House must then receive him. This has been decided in the case of Wilkes: but nothing of this kind can ever happen in France; for the moment a seat

in the National Assembly has by any means become vacant, the suppléant succeeds to it.

I have not time to make this letter as long intended, but I send it you; for I don't know when I shall have time to write again.

After receiving so many letters from me, you will no longer, I hope, pretend that I have not as good a right as everybody else to reproach you with your idleness.

Trail, who subscribes to the Courrier de Provence, lends me the numbers of it as he gets them. I am very much rejoiced that the law excluding the children of bankrupts from voting for representatives in the National Assembly was not carried in the manner it was proposed', notwithstanding that you and Duroveray seem so warmly to have espoused it. Surely it is gross injustice to punish a man for not paying a debt which he has not the

The proposition was that the children of bankrupts, who should not, in the course of three years, have discharged that portion of their fathers' debts with which they would have been chargeable in case they had inherited property from him, should not be eligible to any council or assembly, municipal, provincial, or national, or capable of exereising any judicial or municipal office. (See Moniteur, 1789, No. 78.)