LETTER LXI.

Dear Dumont,

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

* 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 as I 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 exer cising any judicial or municipal office. (See Moniteur, 1789, No. 78.)

means of paying, and which he never contracted. That that law has produced all the happy effects which were seen at Geneva, requires, I think, to be proved. It might be very true that that law existed, and that the people of Geneva were happy and virtuous, without one being the cause of the other; and one might just as fairly conclude, because in England we have a very unequal representation of the people in Parliament, and yet the perfect enjoyment of civil liberty, that these are to each other cause and effect. I think you talk a great deal too much of Geneva, and that you are likely to prevent, rather than to promote the freedom of the Republic by so often dinning it in the ears of the French. They will soon be as tired of hearing you talk of your Geneva as they are of hearing M. Necker talk of his integrity.

We have lately had an account of a most terrible insurrection at Paris. The martial law was held, we were told, in the utmost contempt; every body was under arms, and many lives had been lost. The newspaper, called the World, went so far as to say, that the streets of Paris were streaming with blood, and it concluded the account with saying, that the King and Queen were yet alive. It appears now that there is not a word of truth in all this, except the conclusion. It is supposed to have originated with the aristocratical refugees here, who have great influence over our newspapers. Calonne has the Times entirely to himself. It was in allusion to that circumstance that one of the Miss North's the other day said of the report of the insurrection, that it was une Calomnie; a say