35° Travels in France 



above 100,000 men, and would be amply sufficient for repressing 

 all those riots whose object might be,, immediately or ultimately, 

 the democratic mischief of transferring property.^ This for a 

 free government: — despotic ones, that would wish to escape 

 destruction, must emancipate their subjects, because no military 

 conformation can long secure the obedience of ill-treated slaves ; 

 and while such governments are giving to their people a con- 

 stitution worth preserving, they should, by an absolute re- 

 nunciation of all the views of conquest, make a small army as 

 efficient for good purposes as a large force for ambitious ones: 

 this new-modelled military should consist, rank and file, of men 

 interested in the preservation of property and order: were this 

 army to consist merely of nobility, it would form a military 

 aristocracy, as dangerous to the prince as to the people; it 

 should be composed, indiscriminately, of individuals drawn from 

 all classes, but possessing a given property. — A good govern- 

 ment, thus supported, may be durable ; bad ones will be shivered 

 to pieces by the new spirit that ferments in Europe. The candid 

 reader will, I trust, see that in whatever I have ventured to 

 advance on so critical a sulDJect as this great and unexampled 

 revolution, I have assigned the merit I think due to it, lohich is 



^ The class of writers who wish to spread the taste of revolutions and 

 make them everywhere the order of the day, affect to confound the govern- 

 ments of France and America as if established on the same principles; if 

 so, it is a remarkable fact that the result should, to appearance, tium out 

 so differently; but a little examination will convince us that there is 

 scarcely anything in common between those governments, except the 

 general principle of being free. In France the populace are electors, and 

 to so low a degree that the exclusions are of little account ; and the quali- 

 fications for a seat in the provincial assemblies, and in the national one, 

 are so low that the whole chain may be completed, from the first elector 

 to the legislator, without a single link of what merits the name of pro- 

 perty. The very reverse is the case in America, there is not a single state 

 in which voters must not have a qualification of property; in Massachu- 

 setts and New Hampshire a freehold of £3 a year, or other estate of £60 

 value; Connecticut is a country of substantial freeholders, and the old 

 government remains; in New York electors of the senate must have a 

 property of £ioo free from debts, and those of the assembly freeholds of 

 40s. a year, rated and paying taxes ; in Pennsylvania payment of taxes is 

 necessary; in Maryland the possession of fifty acres of land or other estate 

 worth £30; in Virginia twenty-five cultivated acres with a house on it; 

 in North Carolina, for the senate fifty acres, and for the assembly pay- 

 ment of taxes; and in all the states there are qualifications much more 

 considerable necessary for being eligible to be elected. In general it 

 should be remembered that taxes being so very few, the qualification of 

 paying them excludes vastly more voters than a similar regulation in 

 Europe. In constituting the legislatures also, the states all have two 

 houses, except Pennsylvania. And Congress itself meets in the same form. 

 Thus a ready explanation is found of that order and regularity and 

 security of property which strikes every eye in America; a contrast to 

 the spectacle which France has exhibited, where confusion of every sort 



